Only outside of the city limits, do the untamable things grow in abundance. Blackberry bushes grow rapidly at the edge of thickets and people are free from the judging eyes that haunt densely populated areas. Away from the crowds, individuals can grow in ways they never could in a city. A young boy floats between these two places of pleasure and necessity. Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Blackberries” gives the reader a glimpse into Komunyakaa’s childhood, where he found himself at the tipping point between the beauty of nature and the harsh reality of the world he was tied to. The entirety of the poem is a battle between contrasting ideas. The first two lines exemplify this. The speaker’s hands were stained from picking blackberries. He makes two comparisons, to a printer and a thief. The former is an ideal job and an honest one too. Being African American in a time where racism was at the forefront of most minds, Yusef Komunyakaa would have been more likely expected to grow up and become a thief. The speaker realized he was in between these two worlds when he picked blackberries. He was beginning to see the human world for what it was, broken and prejudiced. At the same time, he had not completely given up on the beauty in life. The speaker was at a young enough age where “[he could] still hold out …show more content…
He used occupations to display a difference between his preferred job of printing and a thief, which would have been assumed of him based solely upon his race. People’s prejudice towards him had started to remove his childlike innocence. Symbolism further displayed him trying to remain separated from the human world. The proverbial straw to break the camel’s back was none other than when his peers looked at him with distain. The culmination of experiences Komunyakaa faced in his childhood grew him in the sad ways of understanding how viciously the world worked during that