Home Ec Lament No.3 Or 4 And The Visionary Plumcake Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[for Margaret Sidney, author of The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew and to Valerie Macon whose poem on Little Debbie Cakes inspired me to write one of my own]

put lots of plums into the batter
and cinammon sugar and children
scatter before their poverty made merry,

enriched with raisin cake, the
side yard chicken's eggs.
I wanted to make a cake like that

from an old fashioned novel
of families in hard times
making the best of it.

but pineapple frappe was on the menu
and white sauce number two.
and never a plummy cake or two

to take your mind off
all the disasters.
so I made do in the future

with Little Debbie Cakes
surreptitously unwrapped
from my bottom desk drawer.

and a plummy imagination.

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015