Memorial for a Lost Poem

My writing teacher loved you.

Well, especially: “M&M faced ragsters jumbling

pell-mell into a faded pink station wagon at dawn.”

A morning of summer blueberry picking was what it was all about.

Donning belts to hold buckets to hold berries

freshly plucked from their limbs.

Later, somewhere in the field, a radio blared Diana Ross and the Super Supremes.

“You can’t hurry love. No, you just have to wait.”

Fifty cents a full bucket. Keep working. Watch for snakes. Break at lunch.

No scatter picking! Who has the lunch cooler? I gotta run to the outhouse.

We saved all summer for new school clothes and shoes.

But the poem is lost. The words, mostly forgotten.

The berries, somebody’s blues.

Flaska’s berry fields?

Gone now.

But I haven’t forgotten the taste of berries, the sounds of Motown, the warm caress of summer in the fields.

Or some words from a poem that just up and ran away.