She once followed bear scat
to find the low-bush blueberries hidden…
Mary Greener Thompson crossed the Rockies on horseback and built a cabin with her husband in Blue River.
She was a pioneer, an opera singer, and Jude Neale’s grandmother. Some 45 years after her death, Neale has paid tribute to her in the poem Wild Berry.
Why poetry?
Neale says that while she’s written prose, what she really loves about poetry is “how you can make something so large or so small with a single word.”
Wild Berry does seem to prove this point. While the poem tells only parts of her grandmother’s story, it somehow manages to bring to life a full and complex person. It is evocative of time and place and spirit, and a journey through the different lives a person can live in a single life time.
Or, as Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate George Mcwhirter described it in honouring the poem with a Magpi award, reading Wild Berry “We are almost able to savour the fruit.”
Neale says she has been writing poetry since she was four years old, but only started calling herself a poet about 15 years ago.
“I signed up for a mentorship program at Humber College in Toronto and had the opportunity to work with poet and fiction writer Elisabeth Harvor for three years. It was after that that I started actually editing my work like crazy.”
All that editing does not seem to be holding her up, as she writes roughly a book of poetry a year.
Her latest, Splendid in Silence, contains Wild Berry and was recently one of three books awarded SPM Publications annual prize for poetry. The manuscript will be published through SPM, and launched in April.
Wild Berry
She once followed bear scat
to find the low-bush blueberries hidden
high above the wide emerald mouth
of the North Thompson river.
She was still and unguarded
and let the swarm of blackflies crawl in
her ears
down the back of her neck.
She knelt beside the fruit
and imagined
a life in the city
where no one would care
about the wild berries
she had dropped like old coins
into the empty tin pail.
• • •
Summer nights in Vancouver
she’d stroll with her sisters
down Granville Street
where she let her cigarette burn down
to ash in the corner of her mouth
It was the ways of the bad girls
who painted their faces
and tinted their finger-waved hair
that she memorized.
She wanted to sing love songs
to strangers who’d mistake her voice for
the river
and her small courage for faith
in the grace of church basement Bingo
and the transparent bake table fruit jelly
plucked from the bushes like beads
• • •
The dragon fly hovered and settled
onto her raven haired beauty
It flickered iridescent blue and
green wings
a peacock’s eye
of colour and light
She liked to pick in the shiver of morning
where the black rooted cliffs
shifted from shadow to blue
The berries rolled into the bucket
purple mementos
to be pressed
against tongue against teeth
in the heavy white winter
when colour is the only thing
we want to believe.
