For some time I have wanted a way to archive poems such as this, the result of COVID effloresecence of the writing hand (and it does contain a cucumber flower, or twenty)

I realised today that it combines the provoking themes of dearth and over-supply, so when I’ve posted this for dVerse Open Link Night (thank you Grace) perhaps I can come back and append later other verselets that exhaust the same theme. I’m thinking here of a few about allotment overwhelm, and others about my rapidly declining ability to cope with the radiance of the Sun, however much I crave Him in winter.

Anyway, with no further ado, here are the cucumbers. It was Mrs Isabel Grainger of Willingham Women’s Institute Produce Market who first told me (in the 1980s) that retaining their flowers at the tip was an indicator of freshness. That was before polyethene cling-wrap on our salads. 



cucumberance, 1983
 
my mother, enchanted by the produce 
heaped on wayside stalls along the lane
- as if at a vegetable show -
returns triumphant, from her rural stroll;
places a cucumber, as gift,
upon the table that we'd bought for £20
and cannot understand my sidelong wince

when you take her out, kindful,
across the gravelled yard
of the half-acre - new to her -
and our ninety-foot glasshouse -
the one for which we bought
the ladder that nearly bankrupt us -

where, ready for the picking
(my task, that night, to set upon my stall)
hang twenty full-grown cucumbers, 
and more to come, each with its terminal 
yellow petal blossom
as proof of freshness


			© Kathy Labrum McVittie 21 June 2021






too much

(to come!)