The Occasional Pie

The Poet's Occasional Alternative
- by Grace Paley -

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead      it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft     a poem would have had some
distance to go     days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it       many friends
will say      why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership       I do not
want to wait a week       a year    a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

from Begin Again: Collected Poems, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001) reprinted in Good Poems for Hard Times, edited by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2005) p. 184