Editor’s note: This month, we asked Minerva Rising contributors: What comforts you? 
Conversely, what doesn’t comfort you? Tell us what you find solace in, or what you’ve removed from your life.
***

After the loss of my mother, I had a strangely comforting experience while commuting home one evening. Here’s the poem I wrote about that experience:

To the Woman Eating on the Eastbound Midtown Direct

Scent of your pear — nectar, August light —

conjures my mother at True Value in Shallotte,

as she chats up the man with the bumper crop.

Right off, she buys two-dozen jars,

 

pectin & drives to his farm in her old Caddie to pick fruit.

Like Ruth gleaning scythe-cut fields, she gathers

a trunk load of the fallen — not the split-skin orbs,

but ripe ones sleeping in wet grass.

*

That Christmas, she gifts us jars of jam.

I wrap mine in diapers when I fly to London,

where the taste of summer cracks the frost grip

of winter’s deprivations in my bone-cold flat.

 

Thank you for your pear, for your ready gratitude,

how you cupped it in your hands and ate deeply to its core.

***
Mary Brancaccio is a poet and teacher. She lives in South Orange, NJ.

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