cooking

family portrait

~ extraplorer ~ 4 Comments

They learned to drive
a tractor at the age of eight.
could deliver a lamb
(or a calf probably)
before they went to school.
When I arrived at their house
I dodged dogs barking: ‘oh
he’ll never hurt you’ at odds
with my fear.
They always cooked for twelve.
We could play in barns
full of hay and straw, taking care
not to be crushed to death
by falling bales.
Their cats lived outside,
their litter tray a pile of sand.
They ate
everything on their plates, even the fat.
Grew their own vegetables and fruits,
enumerated runner bean hauls,
raspberry baskets, plum punnet
and made loganberry jam, whatever that was.

I liked books.

someone I don’t know well

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Betty

Scoured by grey metal catering pots
and pans.  Grown by the
runner beans incessantly.

Worn in by ninety-two
pairs of size four slippers
(latterly, velvet).

Lit by infinite log fires
sussex beech and oak
no longer chopped by him.

Read by books, new, secondhand,
or borrowed, suspended by
an embossed
red leather bookmark.

Captured by photos of an
African safari, Andrew’s family
from Australia and ‘our dear friend’
Nils from Norway.

Fed by a marathon of meals,
fish finger breakfast butties,
roast lamb (fat included),
homemade fruitcake on
forget-me-not plates.

Pinned neatly into position
by a slowly diminishing
grey-white bun.

Loved.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘On hesitating to depict my grandmother’ by Gillian Allnutt (amongst others) and were asked to write a poem about someone we didn’t know well enough in six minutes.