Do you have a poem for an old man making chili for lunch? Like watery eyes from onion crunching–sneezing from pepper thrown… email from Dad 5/5/05

He shoves the onion pieces in a pile
to one side as he chops and chops some more.
This cutting board has lasted quite a while
through salty tears of choppers gone before,
but no use buying new equipment now.
Sometimes there’s comfort in a kitchenette
that holds what downsized spaces will allow
of former habits. He will not forget
those other hands that held this knife and chopped
for slaw and meatloaf, casseroles and stew,
and apple walnut salad. When they stopped,
he stepped up, making chili, making do,
sneezing on pepper, living on his own.
He cooks for one, but never eats alone.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Almost any story can be told in the compass of a sonnet. This one became an elegy cooked up in the mundane of a real moment.”

This sonnet was collected in ‘Road Trip’ (Kelsay Books, 2014)

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing.  The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see the Guidelines at  lightpoetrymagazine.com)

Photo: “Chopping Onions” by TheDarkThing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.