The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 1/2/09

[BlueIris]

"Mom's Lunch"

Mom, at the feeding table, splatters milk,
opens her mouth like an o in hollow
as the aide spoons in a blob of something green.
Even the Birdseye frozen string beans
she served in the 1950's had more appeal.

Canned applesauce in a compartment
of her metal tray isn't the sauce that would scent
our whole apartment when she simmered
strictly Macintosh apples chosen for their tang,
with one Italian plum to add rosiness,
cinnamon, lemon, and palm full of sugar, when
she knew without measuring exactly
how much we needed,

the kettle was for cooking, her refrigerator
for cooling the sauce. Didn't her hands
teach mine how to crank the Foley Food Mill,
scrape away the peel and the seeds,
watch rose-colored droplets seep
through the sieve filling bowl after bowl?

Nettie Liebowitz draped in a bib apron,
the front, her face, her hair smeared with
this puree rainbow--"Such a cockamamie idea,"
she would have called it "from the moon."

--Lois Rosen

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear BlueIris...

How very accurate, and painful...

Thank you.

[MiddleFingerMom]

2. Very very nice.

It brought back memories of both my Mom's final months and images
and impressions and tastes and scents of many years of my Mom in
the kitchen, nourishing our family with meals that would help
facilitate the only times we could/would commune with each other
as a family... and nourishing me with cooking/life lessons.
.
Thank you.

[BlueIris]

3. Welcome to the poetry breaks! Lois Rosen's book, "Pigeons," has a lot of poems

about the relationship between food and family connection. I highly recommend it.