she, so much older than the hills,
brought us lard-thickened cookies.
like eating stale cardboard,
they didn't go down with milk.
'twas all the same, these pucks of grain
she brought to us when one moved on
when sons were married and someone died
the cakes, the scones, the buns came over.
she cultivated a kindness, that she did
from deep in a generation long forgotten
the kind you knew would keep the kettle on
the kind that fed both kin and stranger.
but when my father passed to Tir Na N'Og
she brought us a ham that passed for barely edible
and I, my father's son, wrote a thank you letter
for delivering us from another table full of clutter.
and one day her own man suddenly slipped away,
and we had to return the kindness, the favors,
so, I concocted a lovely creation in my own loving way
to settle her ever-nervous female constitution.
and after many days she grew silent on her porch swing
though many nights she kept the house in light
that thinning frail waif of a decaying woman
with her nightmare blessings of culinary fright.
