Adele Geras has very graciously given me permission to reproduce her poem "Mother N", which fits so well with the way I look at food. I hope the pictures will complement Adele's words.
"She shakes out muesli dunes from cardboard boxes.
Jars on her shelves hold the ingredients of landscape.
She makes seashores pebbled with pulses; haricots and yellow lentils,
kidney beans dark as blood, and black-eyed peas drift to shingle in her bowls.
She has cut down cauliflower branches milky as jade, covered them with the slip and shine of sauce,
and small volcanic outcrops in the dish are rimmed with the beginnings of brown crusts.
Emerald stems of broccoli gather into forests.
Each morning, she peels a grapefruit sun and lamps of orange light her kitchen.
At night, her daughter eats apple crescents arranged round the circumference of a plate like overlapping slices of the moon."
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Adele has just told me the funniest story: shortly after Kaffe Fassett's ground-breaking book "Glorious Knitting" was published, Adele was in a library where she overheard a lady say to the librarian, "Do you have Glorious Knitting by Yasser Arafat?" The image that conjures!
