A little longer,
And time will be stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me
—Philip Larkin


There I sat
Alone with my pie
With its perfect golden crust
And its sugary dust.

The metal fork I
Used rang clear
When it clicked against the plate
Cutting smallish bites.

It’s then that I
Think of my mother—
She taught me how to cook
This pie from a second-rate book.

I was six
When we had to move;
It was best, I was told, to leave what I knew behind
And I didn’t mind.

Everything was new
We had a very small house
Then I started again at school
Oh, the kids were cruel!

And there was nothing
Like our loneliness
I thought to my mother
Too quiet to tell her I loved her.

I hid in my chair
She found the book
“We’ll make a sour cherry pie”
And pulled a glass for whiskey.

We cooked for hours
Cutting cherries and folding crust
Neither of us was concerned
When we saw the pie had burned.

We didn’t care
About the charred
Black welts and the rock-like crust
With its burnt carbon dust—

My mother and I
Were happy, we knew
the fruit and syrup survived
hot and sour, baked inside.