Pain à la Duchesse
First tasted in a tent in a field
in Brittany or the Vendee,
back home they wouldn’t
have been as good,
like crepes or baguettes, even if
they’d been filled with chocolate
or coffee-flavoured custard,
not whipped cream, which
in those days I detested.
Perhaps I was relieved
when I was offered one
at a school friend's house, and got
given a tiny piece of toffee
in a gold and purple wrapper.
Not like the time I bit into one
in a Baptist minister’s back garden.
By then I’d warmed to cream,
but not to sugar butter icing
which his wife had used
as filling. The shock was
like a flash of lightning
which I had no idea
in French was called eclair.
Peter J Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Atrium, Black Nore Review, Obsessed with Pipework, One Hand Clapping, High Window, Ink Sweat and Tears and Fragmented Voices. He came second in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition in 2021 and the Buzzwords open poetry competition in 2020. His first full length collection 'Solving the Puzzle' has recently been published by Alien Buddha Press, as has his chapbook 'The Second of August'.
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