The Blackberry Tree - The Cincinnati Review

We had bananas that bore no fruit, an old macaw
stooped on a weathered cross, and a blackberry tree
that grew next to a wall crowned with broken bottles.
The Andes foothills crumbled on a gravel path;
the desert sun broke through the cloak of winter.
I must have been eight or nine when I climbed that tree
to its highest branch and saw over the jags of glass
a bare woman bathing in a brown field, her quick hands
splashing water from an oil barrel, rubbing hard
with a brick of laundry soap until skin glistened
to that newborn bronze before the ravages of patina.
She did not sing but whistled a tune like a reed,
as if puna winds were grazing ichu grass to sighs
of rosary. A toddler ran to her, and she heaved
the crying child to her waist, then walked still wet
to a zinc hut by a corn patch burnt to stubbled ash.
I climbed down fast and almost sprained my ankle.
At Mass in the Church of the Nazarenes
I had seen women feed their bundled babies
with breasts exposed, and Mamá would pull my lobe,
telling me to think of Mary nursing Baby Jesus
with a shawl of bristly wool as modesty demands.
Our priests taught that flesh is the parchment
of sin and how God’s suckling grace can be lost
by the smallest transgressions in this world
where goodness fails to root against the weed.
Fifty years on I now know that His Law slants
to love, and I will not eat their bread of shame
leavened with fear. On that blackberry tree
my eyes saw divine beauty: simple, coarse, naked—
this gift of light lifting the fog of humanness.

Orlando Ricardo Menes

An NEA Fellow, Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived in the U.S since the age of ten. He considers himself Cuban-American. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English and Poetry Editor of the Notre Dame Review. Menes is the author of seven poetry collections, including the most recent The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (University of New Mexico Press, 2022), as well as Memoria (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) and Fetish, winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as in literary magazines like POETRY, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, Hotel Amerika, The Southern Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many others. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009).

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