Poetry Friday: Banana Pudding

Sometimes, you get lucky. This morning, in the mood for not-so-serious poetry, I googled "banana pudding poem."   My search returned a link to a lovely villanelle, not at all about dessert, but the end of summer. The reason it was drawn into my Google net was because the poet, Karin Gustafson, compared the making of this layered form of poetry to the banana pudding at Magnolia Bakery in New York City, the very place I ordered pudding from to celebrate the launch of Operation Yes. (You can find the recipe for it here.)

I would've savored this coincidence and moved on, except that the villanelle itself shimmers with images and leaves me wondering if all things are as deeply connected as Google search and the interlocking layers of both villanelles and banana pudding would have us believe.



Swimming in Summer
by Karin Gustafson


Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes
as water soaked right through our outer skin.
In summers past, how brightly water shines,

its surface sparked by countless solar mimes,
an aurora only fragmented by limb.
Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes

as we played hide and seek with sunken dimes,
diving beneath the waves of echoed din;
in summers past, how brightly water shines.

Read the rest here

Poetry Friday is hosted today by its founder, Kelly Herold, at Big A, Little a