Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week’s poet is Carol Alfus.
Alfus has lived in McHenry County for most of her life, where she raised her family and taught special education. Now retired, she enjoys traveling, gardening, reading, and most of all spending time with her grandchildren. She has always loved writing, but poetry is her favorite. She loves the way a poem can tell a story, capture a moment, or express a range of emotions from wonder, to anger, to joy, to bliss and beyond.
Alfus takes her inspiration from the sublime (the night sky, the beauty of nature) to the ridiculous (parking lot gulls, fortune cookies) as well as the deeply personal (the birth of a grandchild, the death of a loved one). She belongs to a poetry group at her Unitarian Universalist church, and enjoys sharing her poems with family, friends and at various open mic nights around Woodstock. Here’s her poem “Heirloom.”
This aluminum ice cream scoop is older than me.
It is heavily scratched from decades of use
and utensil drawer jostling.
Only the inside of the scoop and the tongue of the lever that nudges the ice cream into cone or bowl
have retained the original icy pink color
I so loved as a child.
I always see this scoop in my father’s hand.
Dad, who’d been a soda jerk as a teen,
making us foamy concoctions of ice cream and Coca-Cola
for a Saturday night treat;
Dad, serving himself two dips in a bowl,
then eating a third right from the scoop,
his eyes twinkling as he ignored my mother’s scolding; Dad, sneaking the first tastes of ice cream
to a grandchild in a high chair
and grinning with delight at the
wide-eyed, arm flapping reaction.
By some quirk of fate,
this barely-pink family heirloom
now rests in my utensil drawer,
and when I use it,
I can almost feel Dad at my elbow saying,
“Oh c’mon—one more scoop!”
