Redcurrant - Ribes rubrum
A cluster of garnets, lit by the sun;
a self-possessed glow showing where we are strung
on thin strands jewelled heavily in the leaves’ shadow.
Ribes rubrum, awaiting your touch and your longing.
As if, at night, you stood by your lover
and with your own hands bent down to remove
the favourite earrings that she had been wearing.
Not jostling the gems, taking care not to pinch
the sensitive lobes or to catch in her hair,
presenting the gleaming pendants before her
as though offering your gift for the first time, again.
The sun on your neck as you come with your basket.
In gardens, small kingdoms, the harvest is easy.
Beside me my albino cousins, white currants,
are pearls not yet hardened, translucent with promise;
unstrung in your mouth, teeth grazing the stem.
I’m sweet in compotes, but sharper in sauces;
married with raspberries; made into wine;
honeyed, or sipped with a sweet cherry pie.
Gooseberry - Ribes uva-crispa
Don’t picture geese with beaks greedily tugging
My plump sparse-haired fruits from the kitchen garden.
Conjure instead the silvery flash of a fish,
The mackerel, its oily weight motionless,
Lifted and cut by my crisp sour-sweet berries.
Swimming in sauce, swimming for the last time.
Groseille à maquereau I’m called in France
For my use in drenching the mackerel dish.
I’ve answered to older and stranger names:
Feverberry, goosegogs and honeyblobs.
Groseille means redcurrant, but go back in time,
Past grosier and grozer, further and further,
And find yourself tonguing the root of the matter.
Old Frankish krûsil or crisp berry. Truth buried
Deep down in the linguistic layers of time.
A gooseberry fool is no cream-brained confection,
But prize winner, champion, claiming what’s mine.
Flights, Issue Fourteen, November 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 