Blackberries Yusef Komunyakaa Analysis

Yusef Komunyakaa composed Blackberries in 1992 who told the story of himself as a little boy who picked berries and sold them for a living. In Blackberries, Yusef Komunyakaa fixated on the theme of social class by utilizing imagery, metaphors, and allusions to depict the poem. Yusef balanced between the world of wealthy and poor; usage of plethora images and metaphors to illustrate the boy’s perplexed lifestyle while living in a rural world. In the poem was the continuous use of imagery, which exemplified how he connected to the world. In example, the author’s opening verbal expression: “They left my hands like a printer’s” (Line 1) described how the blackberries he touched stained his hands to remind him of the hard labor he’d undergone when hand picking those berries. Yusef also described himself as: “limboed between worlds” (18) signifying how he had to balance between a world of wealth and poor. The connection to the world of poor versus the world of wealth was also mentioned as: “I balanced a gleaming can in each hand” (17). The author painted a picture of the

The boy revealed: “ I saw the boy and girl my age/Smirking, and it was then I remembered my fingers” (22-23). The smirking of the little kids made him realize that his hands were covered in the stains, making him different from the children; the fact that the children in the car were clean represented them as upper class and the little boy covered in filth represented as lower class. Yusef portrayed his character to be a lower class working boy. Yusef additionally reported that he: “could smell old lime-covered/History” (7-8). Lime refers to something either bitter or bright in color; to cover a lime in history may mean that there is no purpose for that object, yet he continues to fill his basket with the berries that may be rotten or covered in