The old man who gives me a bottle

of scuppernong wine promises

it tastes like the freshest dandelion milk

drawn from the spring’s first growth.

It looks dark, not Homer’s wine dark,

but the dark of the bay’s brackish churn

in the hours before a storm, the sky

a dark bruised plum threatening to split.

Those days, my father forecasted doom

and told us not to sit near the windows.

He drank beer until his eyes turned fear

to anger. The storm broke in midafternoon,

a torrent of thumb-sized hailstones

rattling the jalousie windows

and puncturing our shingled roof,

damage my father would have to repair,

tar he’d daub in the holes like salve

on some summer bee sting he felt

in a previous lifetime, sharecropper’s son

walking the rows, picking cotton.

The wine tastes as the old man promised—

loamy and new, like the earth. Imagine

the husks he had to cut to clear the pulp.

You can tell a lot about a grape from color.

The deeper, the sweet. The lighter, the bitter.

You can’t eat the scuppernong skin.

Spit it out onto the earth. Enjoy this sweet

reminder that what splits open often hides

the fruit, even if the outside will choke you.

Jeff Newberry's most recent book is How to Talk About the Dead (Redhawk Publications). His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of print and online information, including Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, DIAGRAM, and South Carolina Review.