BLACK CHERRIES
Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this
— W.S. Merwin, from his latest book Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of the publishers, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
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Featured photo by Mary Keim is used under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). The original photograph can be found here.
This is so quietly beautiful! I wish I could write like this!