TWELFTH IDYLL Berry Pickers In woods and thickets, across flowering fields the women go picking berries: their kerchiefs a bright flock against the black, mud-clotted barrens, dark alder shrubs and buckthorn, willow and dogwood shade. And when they get through the last mud-blind, wreck-tossed ditches, the fields are right there before them, reaching far out of sight, green all the way to the gray moss-backed cottages, the orchard trees and even taller birchtops and pale sweeps. And right up to the stumps in the hoof-tracked paddock, and the gaping clay-plugged siding, run bean fields, oat fields and flax, more than an eyeful, so blinding blue: blue as can be! Slim fieldpaths, green hedges guide them home, with blossoming graindrills, cornflowers, gold wild-radish and tansies at their feet, clusters of thyme in heaven's own blue, the boundary stones pale in the hot sun, fields of red clover stuck over with bees, and the peas twining and climbing in long, yellow streams.

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