Blueberry bushes
brush bungling hands.
Hands heavy with age
—quivering unhelpfully—
gather taste gushing
gems of tang.
No rot. No root-break.
The ripped branches
are simply savaged off
by shaking old hands.
Hands tired of being bound-
back for decades.
Held mute by manners
monastic and proper.
Held still by habit
and a fury hell hath not.
Hands that now shimmy with the shrubbery
and gambol with the bushes.
Hands that dance harder
the closer to freedom they hover.
But the blueberry bramble
hasn’t quite let them be
free as a bobbing bird
lifting broad wings to soar.
Wings steadily slinging
past saturnine light.
Because the bushes still hold
berries worth gathering.
a fortune worth sticking hands
through thorns and thistles for.
Life still holds
treasures that the fallen,
with still and steady hands,
have not the substance to taste.