Coffee and Pancake
Poem
Coffee and Pancake
She bends slowly forward
and hesitantly
brings her hand to
the aged wrinkled pan,
almost glowing from the heat
of the flames below.
It rests on three boulders
that her sons had spent a day
manoeuvring there.
She gently lifts the pancakes
and checks their readiness
for the next meal.
Her kitchen is sparse
and simple to draw.
I brush my pencil rapidly
over the paper, my eye
flowing along the outline
of her stooped body,
her light shawl
contrasting with the
blackness behind,
a coffee pot squatting
at an angle
on a rusting drum
beside a raffia basket
holding three loaves,
crusted with seed,
lightly touched in a faint
orange flamed glow.
A simpler scene.
But not the complexity
of two cultures contrasted.
An artist flies two thousand miles
to draw a woman
who must feed her family
over an open fire.
But when I show her
the finished work she smiles,
a deep lined, fractured tooth smile.
She has achieved a certain fame
in a world she knows little of
and resents not at all.