It’s not quite raspberry season, but, judging by the buds on the bush in my yard, it’s coming soon. This week’s poem gives lovely life to the raspberries that grow in South Addison, where the author spends time during the summer. Who wouldn’t want to return in the next life as one of these berries from this particular meadow?

Kathleen Sullivan lives in Freeport, began writing poetry at 60 and received her MFA from the Stonecoast Program at USM. She writes, “I have had a career as a psychotherapist for 50 years, a profession akin to poetry in that both try to find language for the ineffable undercurrents of life.”

Dear Returns Dept.,

By Kathleen Sullivan

Please note my preference
to return as a raspberry –

not one of those tasteless morsels,
falsely plumped & born under cellophane

but one from this newly mown meadow
where the land ends in a crumple of rock

and the sea crawls towards black islands –
playing hide and seek in the fog like giddy wraiths.

This meadow where the Micmac camped in summer,
wove sweet grass baskets they traded for cash.

This meadow where three little girls,
dead of typhoid in 1840, rest under tilting headstones

luminous in morning sun
as if someone were keeping a light to show the way home,

where the news of the day is published by semipalmated
sandpipers nodding in even-tempered assent.

This meadow where lupines dye the fields purple in May
& the blonde foxes dig their dens,

wait with the warblers & the spectral cormorants
for the blooming of the beach roses in June

that every year will announce
my ripening under this kind, light-stained sky.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Kathleen Sullivan. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.