My grandma made jelly
from a madness of brambles
from a clutch of crab-apples
by means of muslin, transforming
lumpish pulp to sharp-tasting clarity.

Scanning hedgerows
she numbered unremarked
pearls: hip, haw, quince, sloe
among her useful beads,
abacus of a season's reluctant gifts.

Thrift was her magic,
itself a fruit of the briar -
fields of our ancestors' lives.
It soured her,
slowly, over the years.

She trapped summer in cold jars,
laid it thick on wintry bread:
I feared her white silence,
her damson-bitter words.

Clicking her fingers, she summoned
fire of wallflowers, smoke of love-
in-a mist. Deep in her bones,
painful asters bloomed.

I remember the bleeding
of fruit, in a cold kitchen/
Michaelmas in the garden
smell of stalks, and rain to come.

Katherine Duffy