Wedding Cake (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Okay, so I am cheating. 1) I didn't post a food-related poem (or any poem, for that matter) yesterday and 2) today's entry (by Naomi Shihab Nye) has a food title, but there isn't really food in the poem itself.

Instead, this poem is a little story - about how a woman got stuck with an infant while the mother went to the airplane's bathroom to change. She becomes fascinated with the child, starts to feel the pangs of motherhood - the caring, the worries, the hopes.

Instead, this poem seems to say that the whole of something can be distilled and smooshed into something more compact and meaningful. How the child knows "the small finger / was funnier than the whole arm"; how the poem's narrator can feel connected to the child, for life, in less than an hour; how a poem less than 50 lines can explain a mother/child bond and paint the portrait of an infant; how this poem shows the wonder of poetry - full stories and prose-y truths in their most condensed forms. 

Favorite line: "I read new new new."

the small finger was funnier than the whole arm.

the small finger was funnier than the whole arm.vv