At dinner, with butter pecan ice cream and your pizzelles,
We gave the Old Year its send-off.
All the while, memory of my father crowded my heart,
How he would sit at our kitchen table
Just a week or so before Christmas,
Feeding the pizzelle iron with golden batter.
The batter, some of it leaking out, sizzled when he closed the lid.
When each pizzelle was baked, oh so gently he would lift it from the iron
And add it to the others on a cooling rack.
When they had cooled sufficiently, he stacked them in towers on a plate.
Then, smiling, he would offer them out to us,
Who, like hungry urchens, gobbled them up.
As I bit into your pizzelles last night, Teresa,
I pictured the boy he must have been, this beloved Daddy of mine,
Walking and working the family fields in Sant' Alessio,
Fishing in the fiume near by,
Trodding off over Tuscan hills to school,
Two or three books, perhaps bound by leather strap,
slung over his young shoulder.
Oh, Teresa, do you see?
Your pizzelles, delicious as they were, were so much more.
They were memories sweet with longing for a father long gone,
A father still mourned, who had filled our every days
With his labors of love for us.
Thank you, Teresa, for the pizzelles.