Some years ago a friend of mine here in the village had a birthday party for which she requested that her guests bring pies to share. I thought about bring a shoofly pie from my Pennsylvania Dutch childhood -- but not only is this something of an acquired taste, it also would have required me to actually cook...and I'm not much of a cook, and even less of a baker, at the best of times. I solved the problem by bringing a Poetry Pie instead: lining a glass pie plate with a "crust" of autumn leaves, filled with small scrolls of paper tied in ribbon, each little scroll containing one of my favorite poems. (Some of the poems that people selected from the pie that night are still up on bulletin boards around the village all these years later.)
The poem I've chosen for today, "Aunt Leaf" by Mary Oliver, was in that pie.
(Painting above: The Green Woman)
