Although an Enchanted Forest is inevitably scary during the hours of darkness, nothing really bad could ever happen to a fluffy bird 🙂 So, while all kinds of eldritch beasties sneaked hither and yon around him through the night, Algy slept peacefully beneath the massive roots of the ancient fallen tree, and woke safe and refreshed the next morning. He was still perplexed as to how he could find his way home, but the woods on the other side of the rainbow looked beautiful in the daylight, numerous burns were gurgling and dancing merrily down the hillside, and the smaller birds were singing and twittering in the trees. For the moment, therefore, Algy just perched on a handy branch and enjoyed the enchanting woodland morning.

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Being suddenly transported to the other side of a rainbow is apt to leave a fluffy bird feeling rather peckish, so Algy turned his back on the loch and set off in search of food. The lower slopes of the hillside were covered in a rich woodland of Atlantic oak and birch trees, which usually provide a well-stocked larder for their feathered friends – especially in the autumn months. So it wasn’t long before Algy discovered an ideal lunchtime treat… Of course it was actually October, but as he munched the juicy berries, Algy inevitably thought:

           I love to go out in late September
           among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
           to eat blackberries for breakfast,
           the stalks very prickly, a penalty
           they earn for knowing the black art
           of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
           lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
           fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
           as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
           like strengths or squinched,
           many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
           which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
           in the silent, startled, icy, black language
           of blackberry-eating in late September.

This post is especially dedicated to Algy’s new food-loving friend whenislunch, for obvious reasons, and to Algy’s special friend seagirl49, for her wonderfully inspiring work in the world of colour :-))

[Algy is quoting the poem Blackberry Eating by the contemporary American poet Galway Kinnell.]