Berrypicking with My Sisters

 

Each summer
and fall,
we picked berries.
All of us
loaded a pickup
with bread, wood,
tea, sugar, buckets
and bags:
a tailgate feast
with songs
of bear bells,
eating berries
all the way home.

Mom died
before I learned
jarring or jam. Now
we work and age –
carving solitary
pockets of time,
usually late,
wandering
picked-over spots
reluctant to scrape
bright blue dots, golden pieces,
red crush
left by bears
crossing tundra to den.

In winter I feed,
inhale auroras’
glacial blue waves,
think of traveling,
oceans, songs
the land sings
under layers of ice,
the sound of my heart
as it sighs away time.

by Buffy McKay
 

Buffy McKay is Inupiaq and Scottish; her parents were Ida Traeger McKay from Unalakleet, Alaska, and William McKay from Glasgow, Scotland. Buffy has attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Key West Literary Seminar & Workshops, and hopes to complete her B.A. in the near future. Buffy's poems have been published in the Anchorage Daily News (2008 Editor's Choice award), the anthology Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, and the new literary journal Cirque. Buffy's personal mission is "to see the world in as many ways as possible," and this includes living in Anchorage.