bellyfull

Just before dusk I am out to pick the raspberries. They are barely tamed, teeming with fruit and tangled in heaps over heavy-burdened lengths of twine. They are mine.

But they're not, because I am almost nothing to their thriving lives: not the seed-sower, not the grower, hardly the keeper, only the blessed reaper am I.

Fat with juice, a tap to loose a ready berry and it bounces happily from hull to bucket bottom. I crouch in the rich old soil, thankful.

The carrot seedlings fed the evening rabbits, though I tried to tend them faithfully. Theiving crows snatched up the sunflowers before a single sprout could see its namesake. My hands' good work, a feast for scavengers and nothing for it.

Nothing for it, but a bellyfull of raspberries.