Elegy / Blackberries by Martin Willitts Jr.

Elegy

Father died quietly —
a dragonfly over the glass-like water,
or lark-song in a red garden of intention.

Shaken, my prayer flies indirectly,
a paper kite butterfly.

Mourning has terraces,
revelations of love and grief,
striking lightning,
silent after-calm.

I believe my father taps on my window
when I hear ticking rain. It’s his pulse.
Memory becomes a skip-stone across a river.

And when my mother dies,
a murmuring of starlings
carries her soul over everlasting waters,
I am convinced —

love never ends.
It’s always beginning and reaffirming.





Blackberries

We picked the blackberries because we were wild,
reckless with youth,
wanting to swallow that dark wildness.

What’s the point of rules, when you’re kids
if we don’t try bending some of them?
We had too much curiosity and nowhere to use it
except with those blackberries, just beyond the warning sign,
pushing the envelope of curfew.

The news reported another kid was lost in those woods.
That day, I lost the taste for berries for days.
His face floated on the side of a milk carton.
Some boy wasn’t home, leaving a void,
becoming permanent when I saw the empty school desk.

It could have been either me or my friend
that went too far into the blackberry woods, never returning.
The point of rules was driven into me like a nail
holding the No Trespass sign.
I could get picked up by a stranger,
discarded without care, forgotten a newsflash, shredded
in that blackberry darkness.

Martin Willitts Jr has 24 full-length collections including the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent book is “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023). Forthcoming is “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024), and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024).