Pickup Poem Day 16

Six Bags of Carrots

Mixup between touchscreen

and delivery: six fat bags

of carrots, aligned

and bundled with all 

earth's potential, like crayons,

like cartoon dynamite. Laugh

and make soup, quickbreads,

enough to hand out to the neighbors

with gallant pomp, the way

fathers did with cigars

at a birth when people smoked

and visited hospitals. A sin

to waste any. Now of all times.

Make stock. Occurs to you

this is the quantity

for which friends could betray

the quietly holy. Not clinking

silver. An abundance when months

have stolen abundance. Last

bag-and-a-half getting limp 

in the crisper drawer, control

rods taming the decay 

of your last Granny Smith. Lie

that you'll find a way