Dozing Off and Remembering Vegetable Stew With Cabbage.

Drifting into fireside armchair dreams
exhausted from the housework of the day,
I'm standing in the kitchen and I seem
to keep glancing down into a pan, the way
that children do, in charge of cooking.
And the pan's the pressure cooker full of stew,
and what I notice in my anxious looking,
is savoy, so I know that it was you
who made it, with pearl barley. And the scent
drifts up, of vegetable stock.

And then as I begin the slow ascent
to wakefulness, accompanied by the clock,
I feel a great nostalgia and the pain,
of knowing I'll not eat your stew again.