A Poem I found a few years ago and keep in my collection:
Gathering Crumbs
By Regina Brault
Up from the kitchen
mingled with sweet scent of gingerbread
and soft glow from a fifty watt bulb
oven heat filtered into my bedroom.
Like a bird with her ear to the ground
I hovered over the floor grate.
My view was a checkered tablecloth
and my father's hands fingering his dog-tags
passing a red armband with a tortured cross to mama
who pushed it back.
Their wispers fell like crumbs across the table--
children and ovens fused together
to form a single verb.
Hungrily I plucked their words
like Gretel's birds devouring the way home.
A child of nine
I could not digest those crumbs
nor understand what ran my father--
made his run as if searching for the trail
he left behind before the war--
the trail that led to children
safely nestled beneath their father's wings
in a place where CHILDRENOVENS held nothing
but sweet crumbs of gingerbread
that he could sweep away.
Gathering Crumbs
By Regina Brault
Up from the kitchen
mingled with sweet scent of gingerbread
and soft glow from a fifty watt bulb
oven heat filtered into my bedroom.
Like a bird with her ear to the ground
I hovered over the floor grate.
My view was a checkered tablecloth
and my father's hands fingering his dog-tags
passing a red armband with a tortured cross to mama
who pushed it back.
Their wispers fell like crumbs across the table--
children and ovens fused together
to form a single verb.
Hungrily I plucked their words
like Gretel's birds devouring the way home.
A child of nine
I could not digest those crumbs
nor understand what ran my father--
made his run as if searching for the trail
he left behind before the war--
the trail that led to children
safely nestled beneath their father's wings
in a place where CHILDRENOVENS held nothing
but sweet crumbs of gingerbread
that he could sweep away.
