We don't eat our peas with honey

This is the way we eat our peas...

Singing:
"This is the way we eat our peas
eat our peas, eat our peas.
This is the way we eat our peas
on a cold and frosty evening."

Do you remember
how you taught me
to eat peas properly
with a knife and fork;
not scooping them up
as if the fork
were a spoon,
but as polite people do?

Wondering:
"Peas pudding hot,
Peas pudding cold,
Peas pudding in the pot
Nine days old!"

Imagine a child
lining up three peas
between the edge of her knife
and the four tines
of the fork,
screwing up her face
in concentration
as carefully,
she squashes them
onto the fork
and lifts it to her mouth.
Triumphantly,
joyfully she eats.

Playing:
"Five fat peas in a pea pod pressed
One grew, two grew, so did all the rest.
They grew and they grew and they didn't stop
Until one day the pod went 'POP!'"

Tonight I ate peas
the way you taught me
not to do.
Informality is the rule
as with triumph and pleasure
you pick up each pea
between thumb and fingers
and eat.

Humming:
"I eat my peas with honey:
I've done so all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife."

Alcuin of York -

Very interesting write, and very imaginative too. I like the walk-around-the-subject you've made of this. Besides making interesting a simple thing like pea-eating, you've touched on the kind of consciousness kids actually experience.

I have only one nit, which is the change of voice in the "informality is the rule" stanza. You begin with "we ate" to "you pick up". I realize it's the general "you", but it sounds awkward.

Frankly I'm a scooper - never realized it was an impolite way to eat. Then again, unlike the Brits, we habitually leave the right hand free of utensils.

Alcuin

Pags -

Thank you for this.

I knew it would be a difficult poem for some to get to grips with so would need to be clear. Obviously work is still needed. Suggestions appreciated...

The stanza you comment needs to be understood in the light of the context of the whole poem ie it comes from a colection of poems about my father's dementia and how both he and we experience it. What I WANTED to imply was that when I was a child he taught me the proper way to eat. Now in his dementia he fails to notice (or care) that I eat the 'american' way, and he is unable to use cutlery at all for such awkward food so eats with his fingers.

The nursery rhymes allude both to both my own childhood and his growing more childlike as the days progress. I imagine them as a background theme track with the verses over the top.

Regarding the proper, if you will formal way to eat peas is dying out I suspect even here in UK. Though at a truely formal meal many people will still dip the far side of the spoon in soup to eat it, and eat peas with a knife and fork, with the fork the right way up. I doubt the the children of today will think any of this matters when they are my age.

Norm -
I wouldn't change a thing in this. The juxtaposition of the childhood sing-song rhymes with the attempt to be 'proper,' ending with your father's condition are just beautiful. Heartrending, yet still strangely beautiful.