Fava Memories of a Kitchen Midwife
Today I harvested our fava beans.
I slide my thumbnail down their seams.
Fold back their green wings to retrieve
the embryos nestled in their spongy white.
Slick skin slithers through my fingers,
falls plinking to the colander below.
I am midwife at my kitchen table.
My daughters grown, their daughters grown.
My white hair dusted with tiny purple petals.
Before me a mound of empty shells.
Gathering these, I remember the fazenda in Brazil
where I first saw fava beans. The farmer’s wife
who taught the one-room school there
kept her husband’s books at his bodega,
raised her twenty children, mostly grown and gone,
tossed fava from her woven sieve like swirling birds
into the golden twilight beneath a palm.
She watched her chaff be carried by the breeze.
Her reflection so palpable I could enter it,
as if we measured life in fava beans.
Was it worth it? Where had it gone?
Light distant. Womb heavy.
….
This poem first appeared in Word’s Faire, and can be found in the chapbook Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed by ruth mota (Finishing Line Press) at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/kitchen-table-midwife-of-the-dispossessed-by-ruth-mota/
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Ruth Mota currently lives in Santa Cruz, California with her Brazilian husband. Previously she resided nearly a decade in northeast Brazil and worked as an international HIV/AIDS trainer throughout Africa and Latin America. She was first drawn to Spanish language and culture when she heard a Spaniard read from Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre in her English class at Oberlin College. Lorca’s passion continues to resonate with her as she reflects on her diverse experiences with dispossessed people at her kitchen table.
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