Potato Soup
I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen
so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice
as I cook soup for the first time alone.
My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary.
I show the onions to my mother with the webcam.
“Cut them smaller,” she advises.
“You only need a taste.”
I chop potatoes as the onions fry in my pan.
When I say I have no paprika to add to the broth,
they argue whether it can be called potato soup.
My mother says it will be white potato soup,
my aunt says potato soup must be red.
When I add sliced peppers, I ask many times
if I should put the water in now,
but they both say to wait until I add the potatoes.
I add Polish sausage because I can’t find Hungarian,
and I cook it so long the potatoes fall apart.
“You’ve made stew,” my mother says
when I hold up the whole pot to the camera.
They laugh and say I must get married soon.
I turn off the computer and eat alone.
Notes
Where Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking weighed the heavy fatigue of an orchard's solitary harvest, Daniel Nyikos’s Potato Soup pulls us into the digital kitchen, where distant matriarchs across oceans supervise a pot of improvised broth through a glowing webcam. The messy substitution of ingredients and pixelated counsel exposes how tradition operates not as a rigid, static recipe, but as an affectionate dialectic of loss and adaptation, where the desire to recreate ancestral warmth across geographical exile is continually sustained through fond, imperfect compromises. It roots August’s theme of Feast in the bittersweet intimacy of modern domestic life, reminding us that even when we must eat the final stew alone, the table is quietly crowded with the voices, jokes, and care of those who taught us how to cook. #poetry #feast #danielnyikos #august #potatosoup
Poem copyright ©2010 by Daniel Nyikos