Berry Basket

by Lynne Potts

Whoever picks berries in the forest
licks fingers for their flavor

and carries the berries home in a basket,
puts them in a bowl, sugars them, and floats them

in cream; then, with a silver spoon,
eats them and finds them bitter,

knows the strange empty of the basket
and how the sun rims everything

until it descends slowly into the trees
as shadows lengthen, dim, and disappear.

 

Poems by Lynne Potts have appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Magazine, Cumberland Review, and many other journals. She has an MFA from Columbia University and was poetry editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She was a featured poet on WKCR New York and a presenter at the 2006 Michigan Poetry Festival. (4/2007)