Sunday, November 01, 2015

Home Ec Lament No. 3 or 4 And The Visionary Plumcake

[for Margaret Sidney, author of The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew and to Valerie Macon whose poem on Little Debbie Cakes inspired me to write one of my own]

put lots of plums into the batter
and cinammon sugar and children
scatter before their poverty made merry,

enriched with raisin cake, the

side yard chicken's eggs.
I wanted to make a cake like that

from an old fashioned novel

of families in hard times
making the best of it.

but pineapple frappe was on the menu

and white sauce number two.
and never a plummy cake or two

to take your mind off

all the disasters.
so I made do in the future

with Little Debbie Cakes

surreptitously unwrapped
from my bottom desk drawer.

and a plummy imagination.


mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

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