The Tea Berry
I kneel in this cathedral of life.
Knees damp, ground spongy, fingers numb, and nose pressed almost to the autumn earth. Searching reverentially for tea berries. A deep contemplation of the improbability of moss, the brightness of bryophytes ,the scales of the small fern.
An accompanying choir of meadowlarks, their voices like the twanging of a taut wire fence. The croaking corrosive begging of a mischief of Johnny rooks that shadow me. The whispering of white grass. I bend my ear to attend its raspy sermons.
Within the sanctum of white grass clearings- I find them cushioned like blessings on azorella pillows. I gather a handful of blushing pink berries , teasing them out of the acid grassland understory. Pop them into my mouth. Eyes closing to taste their psalms truer.
All fragrance as delicate as their skins, hinting sweetness and an almost not there texture. They taste like this summers sunshine -captured in oval leaves and spun into sugary miracles. Like last winter’s snows born over Antarctica and gifted by the fury of Southern Ocean gales. Like the salt of our seas and the kelp wrecks washed ashore. Like the deep peat. Sei Whales sighing- breath blown ashore.
I imagine the captured carbon in those berry bodies-now entering mine- enmeshing with my hair blowing free in the breeze.
And I can no longer tell where the berry begins, and I end.
Am I in turn rooted into the island soils? Where does the island end and the sea begin?