The British writer Virginia Woolf wrote about the pleasures of having a room of one's own. Here the Vermont poet Karin Gottshall shows us her own sort of private place.
The Raspberry Room
It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny
as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.
It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen
of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists
in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying
so hard to love this world--real rooms too big and full
of worry to comfortably inhabit--but believing I was born
to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch
in the back acre of my grandparents' orchard. I was cross-
stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker's needles. The effort
of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore
my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded
with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of
the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry
dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.
Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood
made it mine--the adventure of that red sting singing
down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:
just space enough for a girl to lie down.
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Beautiful poem
Makes me think of 10 year old me. How I wish I had a place like that to disappear into. I never had any privacy growing up. The intense and raw nature of the poem conceals the "maturity" of another kind of blood that will run down the calves when the she grows up into a young woman. Just amazing -
Heany
Sameus Heany writes of the blackberry bush, he says of the berries that "summer's blood is in 'em"... -
Boison berries filled the shallow slopes along the road
on forest hills on the northern California coast
piling 7 feet tall, bushes sprawl in 50 foot patches
wood thorns permeate the tangled fall
one could knit navigate beneath the brush
but not without being scratched
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I wish children still did this. Beautiful
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Nice and descriptive. I like the way it is written, one doesn't lose breath while reading
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A brilliant piece of writing.
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Great
Yes I remember times as a girl of spots just like that where peace within the pain of the find was untouchable to anyone but me . And the vision while looking through was of another world -
i did this as a boy too; there was a whole world of different rooms in there and they were all mine to explore.
beautiful! -
This i a really good write good job i remember the same thing when i was younger along with my sisters. Well congrats on the write!!
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