Poem: Conjuring Nana by Barbara Quick

My wonderful Oz/Maine/Tucson friend, Sheila, sent me a lovely card and a wonderful poem for my upcoming birthday.  I'm sharing them both so they're firmly set in my memory.

                   Conjuring Nana

I learned how to make Nana's chicken soup

by shadowing her steps in the kitchen,

taking notes on a white paper napkin.

A cauldron of sorts is required, as well as a

once-animate chicken submerged above

the stove's blue flame.

"You put in the onions," Nana said,

her Russian accent as fresh as the breeze

must have felt on her face when she debarked

at Ellis Island in 1916 or so.

"How much salt?" I wanted to know --

and when she shrugged I could see

a palimpsest of the girl she was at my age.

The water boiled and the air filled with steam.

Not offering an answer in words,

she poured salt into her upturned palm

and tipped it out into the pot.

No measuring cups for my Nana.

"A little this, a little that" she'd say,

cocking her head, adding a pinch of black pepper

and copious piles of carrots and celery.

I thought about the chestnut-colored braid

my other showed me, wrapped in a piece of sea-green silk.

Nana was beautiful when she was young.  

Everyone said so.

Cleaning a leek, she told me, "I don't know

what it's called, but it makes the soup good."

Sixty-four now and all my elders dead,

I add a parsnip as well, just as I watched Nana do,

and I feel the velvet touch of her hands on my forehead.

All the old people I knew 

spoke English with sounds borrowed

from Russian and Polish, Yiddish and Romanian.

I assumed, as a girl, that I would speak like that, too,

when my hair turned gray and the pads of my thumbs

grew soft and pillowy.

Gathering parsley for the soup from my garden,

I seem to hear Nana saying my name

made rich with her guttural R's and broad A's.

"Bahbra, dahlink!" the birds are singing today.

I boil Manischewitz noodles, only adding them

to the bowl when I ladle out Nana's love.

Golden and gleaming with fat,

as bejeweled as the star-filled sky must have looked

when, shipboard, she tipped her kerchiefed head back

and filled her eyes

with all the dazzling possibilities,

and all the dangers, of a new place,

a new language, a new land.  Her favorite brother

waiting for her with his Romanian wife.

The brother-in-law she'd marry. 

Twenty-seven years following the end

of Nana's life, her love fills me up

and restores me.