Raised by Ross Thompson, written in Bangor during Lockdown 2020
With your hands dusted as if from reading
tombstones, you lift the dough, warm as laundered
sheets from beneath a towel, and start kneading,
both heels stretching and pushing to conjure
a stonewashed boulder pillowy to touch
and brewery sweet with scent of soda
and buttermilk. By memory, you tuck
and crimp, inhaling heady aroma
of your mother’s kitchen. Your own songbird,
dimpled fingers replicas of your own,
mimics your movements. A rising sonder
briefly flutters your eyelids like the clothes
drying on the line on this warmest month
on record but you blink away the tears,
gently tend the bread and tell her that once,
in the good years before war and the fear
of a wicked disease made us brittle
and prone to weepy silliness, distant
relatives baked these farls on a griddle
with ground flour and homegrown ingredients
beneath a chimney swept clean by a goose
on a string. She yawns and says she was taught
this in school, and taps her cup for more juice,
leaving snowy ghost prints around the top.