POEM: A Lesson Learnt
My mother was weeping,
again,
when she told me teaching was like
spending hours in the kitchen,
preparing a careful feast,
with love,
for a table of ungrateful eaters
who scoff the meal down,
without thanks,
and leave you to wash up the dishes,
alone.
So many weekends and evenings lost
for children who couldn’t care less
about classroom activities
which took hours to prepare,
and only seconds to destroy,
with a single roll of teenage eyes,
or a loud, exaggerated, yawn.
Leaving cruel laughter instead of wonder
and replacing wisdom with empty snark.
When she got her diagnosis
it was one of the first things that she did:
filling a skip with all those folders and box-files.
Shutting the door on disappointment.
Her legacy of recipes,
cooked only to leave her cold.
No longer needed
now that time was too precious to waste.
When I started my own journey,
and began the same hopeful sacrifice
of evenings and weekends,
to cook nourishing meals
for mouths that refused to open,
or that swallowed glumly,
without thanks,
I felt my mother’s presence
as I slaved over that same hot stove.
The one she had warned me not to touch.
I wish she were here still to tell
how at least one of her offered lessons -
one more meal she cooked with love -
did not go unappreciated
(although it seemed so on the surface,
when I told her I knew better).
That it nourishes even now.
And I can smile with every eye-roll,
similar to my own,
and feel ok,
despite my disappointment,
after every wasted night,
because I,
unlike her,
do not cook in my kitchen alone.
No appetite for a meal served at the time;
we might creep back for leftovers,
later,
under cover of darkness.
Illuminated only by the light of a fridge,
which comes on only when we choose to pull it open.
Or,
the meal taken when given,
but gobbled
too fast to taste,
without pleasure or savouring,
might be thought of only later,
when the gnawing ache that yearns for more,
discovers it cannot feed itself.
Pearls thrown before swine,
(as she once threw them before me)
glitter still in their abandonment.
To be noticed and picked up again,
later,
by any pig who finally notices.
And in their tenacity they remind me,
that she wasn’t always wrong.