Rewind.

A year and a half ago I posted this poem. I’m going back into my archives now and bringing some of those poems back, on the days where time doesn’t lend itself to writing more poetry.

I remember this day of picking cherries with my wife, the heat, the empty fields nearby, the shriek of the hawk’s call playing over and over.

It was the near the end of the season, so there were fewer berries to find, our bucket filling up slowly, mine more slowly than my wife’s who had the benefit of seeing the color of ripe berries.

I was going by feel, which I always do when picking fruit. I can actually see color, but I cannot distinguish shades the way most do. I can’t tell a ripe cherry from an almost ripe one.

So I felt for a cherry so hard it wanted to burst. That’s how I pick them.

I doubt you could find this poem on my site now. I don’t have a mechanism that allows you to easily go back and read the older posts. It’s a bug and a feature, something I could fix pretty easily but don’t want to.

It may be why I only have 75 subscribers. I look at other sites, some blogs, some poetry posts, and almost always I see hundreds if not thousands of followers.

It has been a year and a half now since I introduced the site. This poem was the sixth poem I posted, Act I of a two poem couplet on cherry picking.

If I’m critical here I’m not sure the comparison to a circus is the right one–I don’t allude to a circus anywhere else, though I think I was using the idea that this is a “balancing act” as something you would find, and probably only find, at a circus.

Other than that, where do we see actual people balancing things? Buskers on the streets that I’ve seen perform music or magic or juggling. I’ve seen them infrequently on talent shows like AGT or can find them on YouTube, for sure.

Ok, I’ll give myself a break on the reference.

It opens up so much more for the poem that I didn’t utilize–clowns, trapeze artists, tents, large animals.

Not a miss perhaps, but maybe.

I really like the line, “this old ladders arthritic bones/and my rusted red knees”. That is well done. Save the fact that this particular ladder was fiberglass and thus there could no be rust. The chance to play with the color red when picking cherries, to compare rust with arthritis, to contrast a human with a ladder. Well done, younger me.

I do not have as much lyricism as I’ve moved into, nor the lack of capitalization. This poem has multiple sentences while my newer poetry often is just one sentence, thoughts connected or not with commas.

The title, for those who perhaps never played the game, is to “Hi Ho Cherry O” which I played as a kid and also with my own children.

I love the game, simple as it is, with plastic cherries held on cardboard trees with holes, each player with a plastic bucket they fill, each turn a spin of a spinner and losing or gaining cherries.

I remember taking the photo, pretty happy with myself for the focal point on the word “danger” and the blurred background.

WordPress would gladly let me rely on AI generated images. I surmise that many WordPress blogs do in fact use this feature. The images are pretty amazing. The opportunity is hard to turn down.

I have turned it down, save adding WP’s version here at the end of these thoughts about the poem sections I’ve gone to now. I wish I had done them then. I would love to see what I actually was thinking back then.

Here’s WP’s image for the curious: