“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“Breakfast with Humpty Dumpty” by Michael Cheval.
COME EAT WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE by Cathy Bryant
Come eat with me and be my love and we will buy some plus size pants and gorge on sweet syruped kisses down supermarket food aisles dance until thrown off the premises, my fine eclair, my lemon puff.
Come eat with me and lose your scales and gain lasagne, served with wine, and ripe persimmons, plums and pears my fragrant fruit, oh lover mine, and we will laugh at diet cares and low-fat bread that swiftly stales.
Come eat with me and roll on cake and find crumbs in each other's hair and nibble on as far as we can until, replete, we lie quite bare on our smooth bed of marzipan, my love who dares to shake and bake.
Come eat with me and feel our flesh as soft as custard, warm as toast as comforting as treacle tart as healthy as a hot nut roast, my love, who nestles in my heart - no sell-by date. Forever fresh.
With the Summer Solstice sliding in next week, thought I’d share a couple of juicy poems from Barbara Crooker’s latest book, Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024).
“Velvet Cherries in Crystal” by Tanya Hamilton.
Though her central theme for this collection is aging, loss and grief (her poems will especially resonate with baby boomers), she balances the inevitable with hope and gratitude for those luminous moments of clarity and startling beauty that occur when we take the time to be fully present.
“Still Life with Raspberries in a Basket” by William Hammer (1863).
There are upsides to being ‘of a ripe old age’ — not the least of which is being able to enjoy summer’s generous bounty of sweet, juicy, sun-ripened fruit.
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“Red and Black Plums” by Robert Papp
PLUM
Thumbprint of the moon,
blush of the summer sky.
A rim of sweetness
hemmed in damask.
Bruise-blue, ruby red,
autumn gold; the full
spectrum of sugar.
The thrum of a tenor sax.
You brood on the tree,
biding your time.
If we're lucky, we'll
find you whole, oval,
unstung by wasps,
ungnawed by squirrels.
You will fill
a child's palm.
Hot juice
of an August night,
a gulp of dark wine.
A taste
that winter,
which we know
is coming,
cannot erase.
Barbara:“Plum” came from both our terrible plum crop (we planted a little orchard when my husband retired (2 apples, 2 pears, 2 plums, 2 peaches)) and from the organic plums I bought at a local farm stand (Eagle Point). So it’s a combination love poem to the fruit and also to the luscious “um” sounds I sprinkled throughout (including, or especially, summer) . . .
“Sometimes, love looks like small things.” ~ Tracy K. Smith
I’m a big fan of James Crews’s poetry anthologies and often dip into them whenever I need a calming moment of reflection or a fresh dose of inspiration.
Both poets pay homage to their Italian grandmothers, recalling childhood memories that continue to sustain and nourish.
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“Grandma’s Kitchen” by Lisa Pastille.
THE LESSON by Paola Bruni
On Sundays, Grandmother alight on the altar of making and I, only old enough to kneel on a wooden chair beside her, watched. From the cupboard, she unearthed a dusky pastry board, flour formed into a heaping crater, the center hollowed. Eggs, white as doves. Salt. Cup of milk, fragrant and simple. No spatula. No bowl or mixer. Just a pastry board and Grandmother's naked, calcified fingers proclaiming each ingredient into the next. She murmured into the composition until the dough fattened, perspired, grew under her ravenous eye. A rolling pin to create a still, quiet surface. Then, the point of a sharp knife chiseling flags of wide golden noodles. For days, the fettuccini draped from wooden clothing racks in her bedroom under the scrutiny of Jesus and his Mother. Mornings, I slipped into Grandmother's bed, dreamt about eating noodles swathed in butter and the sauce of a hundred ripe tomatoes roasted on the fire.
~ from The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, edited by James Crews (Storey Publishing, 2023).
“The scent of cinnamon is like a hug for your senses, wrapping you in comfort and nostalgia.” – Unknown
photo by Brent Hofacker.
What could be more enticing than the sweet spicy aroma of cinnamon wafting from the kitchen? It carries the promise of something scrumptious in the oven: apple pie? gingerbread? snickerdoodles, bread pudding?
Mmmmmmmm! Warm and woodsy cinnamon feels cozy and comforting. It speaks of Saturday morning cinnamon toast, late summer peach cobblers, hot mulled cider, nutty streusels and autumn’s molasses cookies. It’s snappy cinnamon tea and hot chocolate with whipped cream. Moreover, cinnamon is the smell of Christmas.
Good aromas transcend time and space by not only stimulating the appetite, but conjuring up satisfying, sensory-rich food memories. We thank Nebraska poet Judy Lorenzen for permission to share her poignant poem and for commenting on what inspired it.
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“Cinnamon Roll” by Justin Clayton
CINNAMON by Judy Lorenzen
with a line from William Butler Yeats
Where goes the memory wandering but to the house of my childhood to smell the sweet aroma of Mother's baking goods. Where her kneading hands are covered in butter or in flour where the crimson spice's fragrance hangs in the air for hours. And there is nothing better than in her presence here, to see her face, feel her embrace, I feel the welling tear. The loaves of bread and rolls dark red, were love that served the child, where time is gone and memory lives my mind rests for a while. I didn't know how fast time passed, holding her cinnamon-scented hand, For the world's more full of weeping than I could understand.
Cinnamon-Streusel Coffee Cake via King Arthur Flour.
NOTE FROM JUDY:
“I bought a cinnamon-scented candle the other day. After I opened the lid to take in the perfume, my mind went straight back to my childhood. My mother was such a wonderful mother, a natural teacher who was always teaching my six sisters and me about the flowers, night skies, stars, constellations, the birds and their songs—everything.
She taught my sisters and me to read before we went to school, using the King James Bible. She had memorized a lot of poetry in her childhood, and sometimes, these long, beautiful poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost or John Neihardt, among others, would come pouring out of her. I’d watch her face glow as she quoted them and listen to the music in the poetry. I was mesmerized by her and all of her abilities—we all were. We just never stopped learning from that wonderful woman.
l to r: Jamey, Joy, Mom, Judy, Jonna & Jacki (Jo & Jill not pictured).
Because there were seven of us girls, she baked a lot, and we all loved those days. The cinnamon smell lingered around the house all day. When I walked home from Engleman Elementary on baking days, I could smell the cinnamon on the winds as I got closer to home, and I knew what was waiting inside those doors. Such sweet memories!
I write memoir poetry, and many times, a smell, a song, or a thought triggers a poem. The cinnamon candle made me think about how much I miss my mother and her sweetness, and I remembered that line from Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’ that I loved so much. I thought about how true it was that I didn’t understand then that the world was so full of weeping. I knew I had to end my poem with that line—she loved that poem.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Judy Lorenzen is a poet and writer who holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work appears in journals, anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and on calendars and websites.
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Lovely and talented Irene Latham is hosting the Roundup at Live Your Poem.Be sure to check out the full menu of poetic goodness being served up around the blogosphere this week. Enjoy your weekend!
Jama's Alphabet Soup 