Picking Blueberries
Picking Blueberries - meaning Summary
Wonder Held Across Decades
The poem recalls an accidental encounter between a sleeping berry-picker and a deer. For a brief moment, both creatures pause in mutual surprise and curiosity before the deer retreats. Although the event lasts only seconds, the speaker says its intensity has remained vivid for thirty years. Remembering the deer lets her leave ordinary life and return to a state of wakeful, amazed attention to the natural world.
Read Complete AnalysesOnce, in summer in the blueberries, I fell asleep, and woke when a deer stumbled against me. I guess she was so busy with her own happiness she had grown careless and was just wandering along listening to the wind as she leaned down to lip up the sweetness. So, there we were with nothing between us but a few leaves, and wind’s glossy voice shouting instructions. The deer backed away finally and flung up her white tail and went floating off toward the trees - but the moment she did that was so wide and so deep it has lasted to this day; I have only to think of her - the flower of her amazement and the stalled breath of her curiosity, and even the damp touch of her solicitude before she took flight - to be absent again from this world and alive, again, in another for thirty years sleepy and amazed, rising out of the rough weeds listening and looking. Beautiful girl, where are you?
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