Weekend Mini Challenge: Cooking up a storm

Welcome to the Weekend Mini Challenge!

I love the poetry of Moniza Alvi, a contemporary poet who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and moved to England when she was a few months old. Most of her poems are about 'growing up... and feeling half-Pakistani... on the edge of things’, a topic she explored in her first, full-length collection, The Country at My Shoulder, which earned her a place on the New Generation Poets list in 1994. Since then she has published seven collections for which she has been nominated for several prizes.

Alvi' writes about place and identity, duality, difference, displacement, borders and edges, as well as possibility, worldliness and making connections. A wonderful example of this is her colourfully evocative poem ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’ which you can read via the following link: http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/moniza-alvi/presents-from-my-aunts-in-pakistan/.

The poem with which I hope to inspire you is ‘Indian Cooking’:

The bottom of the pan was a palette –

paprika, cayenne, dhania

haldi, heaped like powder-paints.

Melted ghee made lakes, golden rivers.

The keema frying, my mother waited

for the fat to bubble to the surface.

Friends brought silver-leaf.

I dropped it on khir –

special rice pudding for parties.

I tasted the landscape, customs

of my father’s country –

its fever on biting a chilli.

Image from Shutterstock

I would like you to write a poem in the same format, four tercets, about cooking: it can be someone else doing the cooking, you cooking alone or together with a loved one; it can be sweet or sour, spicy or bland, a special or an everyday meal. All I ask is that it appeals to the senses and is related to your life or culture in some way.

Link up your poem below and enjoy the colourful and delicious cookery of other toads!