Elegy for a Kitchen Table

The kitchen table was the centerpoint of childhood, a place of gathering, an easel for artworks, battleground for homework and Eden for the creation of lifeforms moulded from plasticine. It was the Formica altar on which daily meals were celebrated, a patch of the real, ground zero for tears and laughter and a bench for my mother to cut fabric into shapes from paper patterns to sew together into minor miracles. The kitchen table was an arena for games where monopoly fortunes were won and lost on its real estate - a surface slapped senseless in games of “snap”, the pride soaked soil of the Colosseum where my Dad and I played chess. It was a resting place for the hands and elbows of four generations, a soak for human pain and hurt and wore without protest the hot candle wax and cream from countless birthday cakes. It listened patiently as lives unfolded in language. The kitchen table was a poem written not in words, but in wear and tear and in the morse of scuffs, scratches and stains inscribed upon its surface. I do not know its fate. Sadly, like the pages of most poetry, it has been lost to time. It deserved better.