It’s about the journey,
I get told, not the destination.
Three dogs later I wonder
which of the dogs is walking with me
and if it’s not about the destination
why do we have to climb up that hill
and not just sit and look into the valley?
My dog —Rex or Happy or Maggie—
pants beside me.
The smell of blackberries heating
in the sun on the bushes below
wafts up to us. Even I,
with a twenty-thousandth of the olfactory power
of my doggy companion,
know that sweet-sour tang
that belongs only to blackberry.
Rex gets up, stiff legged, and looks at me.
All right, I say, let’s get some,
and we climb down.
Happy always loved blackberries.
He would cock his head
and eat them oh-so-carefully off the vine.
No thorns that way, Rex says.
We wander on,
full of the taste of blackberry.
—Sarah Webb
No comments:
Post a Comment