Poetry/cake please

It strikes me how many Quakers are poetry lovers/writers. Or at least that's how it seems to me. In our newsletters, here on the blog, and now Roger's poem in The Friend.

So, it shouldn't surprise you that I had a lovely conversation about poetry after Meeting this past week. Partially about Roger's poem, but not just and not just really although I liked his poem and could publish a post just on why I like what he wrote down and pulls out of experiences for me (thank you for reminding me of the blue shirt). I like this about Quakers though, this word-and imagery-loving-ness.

I went home smiling about that and then I almost literally tripped over a poem I wrote last summer (well the book it was in) not about Quaker worship but because I had been trying to describe how the sacred occurs at other times.

And I felt inspired by that talk and by Roger to rewrite it...and then share it. I wonder how many of you have poems about Quakers too? How many poems are there in newsletters or in closed pages or whispered on tongues but never spoken aloud? Wouldn't it be nice to publish/re-publish some of them here together?

Anyways, must run...am off to - what else - a talk on poetry :-).

Quaker cakes
by Nadine Wills

It's the sifting together
deliciously layered
that somehow reveals
strawberry smiles.

It's in the brought-ness
this done thing - sharing -
waiting to be undone.
Because it was brought
now a mostly empty space
in place of that sweet offering.

And everyone ate
a daffodil sun
dappled chocolate fingers
sometimes we didn't talk
as children
hopped around us.
And perhaps
in moments
small as fairycakes
nothing matters.

But we ate.
We came together and we ate
what was offered to us
with all those hands and tastes.
All those times,
with all those Friends,
we ate.
We ate Quaker cakes.