Poem
Helen Dunmore
Wild Strawberries
Wild Strawberries
Wild Strawberries
What I get, I bring home to you:a dark handful, sweet-edged,
dissolving in one mouthful.
I bother to bring them for you
though they’re so quickly over,
pulpless, sliding to juice
a grainy rub on the tongue
and the taste’s gone. If you remember
we were in the woods at wild strawberry-time
and I was making a basket of dock-leaves
to hold what you’d picked,
but the cold leaves unplaited themselves
and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves
until I gave up and ate wild strawberries
out of your hands for sweetness.
I licked at your palm:
the little salt-edge there,
the tang of money you’d handled.
As we stayed in the woods, hidden,
we heard the sound system below us
calling the winners at Chepstow,
faint as the breeze turned.
The sun came out on us, the shade blotches
went hazel: we heard names
bubble like stock-doves over the woods
as jockeys in stained silks gentled
those sweat-dark, shuddering horses
down to the walk.
© 1988, Helen Dunmore
From: The Raw Garden
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Northumberland
From: The Raw Garden
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Northumberland
Helen Dunmore
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)
Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire and studied at the University of York. She began to write poems as a child, and has published nine collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Glad of These Times (2007). Her second collection, The Sea Skater, won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; The Raw Garden was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and her collection of poems for childr...
Poems
Poems of Helen Dunmore
Close
Wild Strawberries
What I get, I bring home to you:a dark handful, sweet-edged,
dissolving in one mouthful.
I bother to bring them for you
though they’re so quickly over,
pulpless, sliding to juice
a grainy rub on the tongue
and the taste’s gone. If you remember
we were in the woods at wild strawberry-time
and I was making a basket of dock-leaves
to hold what you’d picked,
but the cold leaves unplaited themselves
and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves
until I gave up and ate wild strawberries
out of your hands for sweetness.
I licked at your palm:
the little salt-edge there,
the tang of money you’d handled.
As we stayed in the woods, hidden,
we heard the sound system below us
calling the winners at Chepstow,
faint as the breeze turned.
The sun came out on us, the shade blotches
went hazel: we heard names
bubble like stock-doves over the woods
as jockeys in stained silks gentled
those sweat-dark, shuddering horses
down to the walk.
From: The Raw Garden
Wild Strawberries
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère