National Poetry Month #eatingpoetry

Welcome to April and National Poetry month! What are you planning to do to celebrate poetry this month?

• Read more poetry?
  You could start by subscribing to The Writer’s Almanac and/or Your Daily Poem to get a new poem emailed to you each morning.

• Write more poems?
  Several websites deliver a new poetry prompt each day of April:
  Poetic Asides
  NaPoWriMo

• Attend a poetry reading?
  If you’re in the Vancouver area / Lower Mainland, you’re invited to ours. The Fraser Valley Poets Society‘s April event is a Blue Moon Reading, April 13th (6:30-8:30 p.m. Clearbrook Library, 32320 George Ferguson Way, Abbotsford, B.C.).

Yours truly is the featured reader that evening. I’ll be reading from Borrowed Gardens, the anthology that three friends and I published in December 2014. (There’s a small sampling of the poems in the book here.)

There will also be an open mic following the Blue Moon feature, so bring a several of your own poems to read.

The League of Canadian Poets has suggested the wonderful theme of FOOD for this month’s poetry. To go with that theme, here is a poem about one of my favourite childhood treats:

Puffed Wheat

Puffed Wheat—my generation’s Cheerios
for baby’s highchair tray.
Wheat grains magically blown up
beige-speckled, quarter inch
elongated puffs, tiny bums.

I didn’t like them as cereal
that I had to eat in a rush
before they shrunk small, slimy
and sticking to teeth when I sipped
the sweet speckled milk dregs
from the bottom of the bowl.

But a concoction of butter, cocoa
sugar and syrup cooked
hot enough to brand skin
poured over 8 cups in Mom’s enamel roaster
mixed frantically with a wooden spoon
before the sticky mass congealed to stiffness
then warm-pressed into a buttered pan
made the best birthday cake
in the world!

© 2015 by Violet Nesdoly (all rights reserved)

Share your food poems with other Canadian poets using the hashtags #eatingpoetry and #NPM15