MY GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN

Christmases, my grandmother set

A crystal tray of cookies out.

She’d claim they were homemade; but bet

Against such folksy verity,

For emptied cartons lay about

The kitchen where we all could see.

Could see, that is, had we just cracked

The heavy portal to that room

Which guarded stove and icebox, lacked

Nothing her husband could afford,

But seemed a cell of heat and gloom

Where chicken thawed on the cutting board.

It was her inmost privacy

Around which all that great house turned,

And from which good things came to be,

By what brow-glistening toil, what pride,

What fussy cunning, none dared learn

But, with our hunger, stayed outside.

This poem appears in the April 30, 2018, print issue of NR.