Stealing Cherries
Author: Bill Roberts
They were falling from the tree
by the time we discovered them,
the sour cherries we loved
to pluck from forbidden trees
and eat without washing,
filling our pockets with as many
as we could gather with our
tiny fumbling fingers, always
on the lookout for the owners
in the tiny house beside the tree
where we, Dickie Keyes and I,
perched precariously on laden
limbs of that old exhausted sour
cherry machine, probably as old
or older than its two owners
who suddenly appeared, waving
at us with paper bags, shouting
as we jumped down to the fruit-
strewn ground, getting cherry juice
on our clothes and bare arms,
scampering away happily, laughing,
not wanting to hear the old folks
yell at us that we could have all
the cherries we could pick, fill
the bags they were waving, come
back little boys – no, we didn’t
want to hear it because stolen
cherries tasted so much better.
(Published in the Fall-Winter 2003-4 issue of The Raintown Review)
Note: Hot summer in Georgetown, the historic section of Washington, D.C., where I grew up so happily. This was probably in 1945 as the war was ending, possibly when Dickie Keyes and I were ten, the year after that war. Cherry trees were profuse along the length of the Potomac River, especially in yards with tiny houses just off the C&O Canal that paralleled the river, as did the adventuresome Chesapeake & Ohio train tracks, also affording us dangerous, forbidden pleasures. We survived our adventures, outgrew our thieving ways, even went to American University together and joined the same fraternity. Alas, Dickie died way too young, but I like to remember fun times together with my poems.
