"Delicate blue-black, sweeter from meadows
Small and tart in valleys, with light blue dust
Huckleberries scatter through pinewoods
Crowd along gullies, climb dusty cliffs,
Spread through the air by birds;
Find them in droppings of bear.

Stopped in the night
Ate hot pancakes in a bright room
Drank coffee, read the paper
In a strange town, drove on,
      singing, as the drunkard swerved the car
Wake from your dreams, bright ladies!
Tighten your legs, squeeze demons from
      the queynt with rigid thighs
Young red-eyed men will come
With limp erections, snuffling cries
To dry your stiffening bodies in the sun!"

1950s California was on the fast track to become a tree-hugging kind of place.

The Beat authors felt most beat down in the early years of the movement, when they were living back in New York City. But the San Francisco Renaissance was pretty upbeat, because California is awesome. We mean, because it was already becoming an epicenter of the coming cultural revolution.

Gary Snyder was one of those groovy San Francisco natives who teamed up with the New York City transplants—Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady—to incorporate a little transcendence into Beat literature.

Snyder draws on Buddhism and employs a delightful cast of characters in this piece, from people to berries to a coyote. The poet uses this range of voices to examine how corrupt human nature can introduce itself to the non-human world.

Drunkards and bright ladies seem like pretty standard Beat material. But Snyder goes beyond that human focus; he introduces the pastoral world of huckleberries and pinewoods and gullies into the movement.

And while we obsess about our crappy American breakfasts, berries actually have quite complicated life histories. Snyder reminds us that they are scattered by birds and found in bear droppings, as part of a mutually beneficial ecology. Even though the birds and the bears eat the berries, they are also participating in spreading the berries' seeds.

The moral is, kiddos: nature knows how to keep herself fed. In this piece, Snyder wants the reader to realize that human behavior can seem remarkably crass when compared to nature's harmony.

Berries have many lives—who woulda thunk it? They grow and ripen, and are eaten by birds, bears, and humans. Then they get scattered to grow again in other places to repeat the cycle.
And this focus on berries is an expression of the Buddhist concept of samsara (the wheel of life.)

You'll notice that each stanza that's told through a human voice is always followed by a berry section. The repetition highlights the natural cycles that all creatures go through, including humans. We just like to forget this fact of living and dying, what with our complex societies and all.

So, as Snyder highlights, we try to forget our mortality by eating non-nutritious food and paying each other for sex. This poet really wants us to wake up and smell the samsara; you can practically hear him saying, "C'mon, guys, let's just become a positive part of the cycles of nature already. Seriously."