Our neighbors across the street
who always treated me as poor relation
took me with them mostly because
I was just good cheap labor
as I had already proven my ability
working 10 days in the potato harvest
for their tight-fisted farm relatives
for a dollar a day and lunch.

So the night before we went picking
I spent in back seat of the station wagon
reading Erich Maria Remarque’s
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
in the dim glow of my flash light
slapping at a few of the mosquitos
and discovering the indelible horror
of the First World War (of the 20th century)
in the chill of the northern night
swaddled in our arctic mummy sleeping bag.

I was so tired when they rolled me out
before the sun was really even up
it was all I could do to not fall over
in the brush as I took my morning pee
and I will never remember anything
about the ride to the blueberry patch.
There was still fog on the bogs
when we got there and I was soon
as afraid of getting soaked as I was
that I wouldn’t be able to go on
picking and picking those endless
little blue berries in the squashy lowlands.

Until the sun rose and blasted down
upon our naked heads and you could feel
the moisture rising all around us as if
we all would be as full of it as the blue
berries waiting in the bushes and buckets
so blue, blue blue waiting to be eaten.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.