Cigarettes and Tea

Marcel Proust,
The French Writer,
ate a biscuit dunked in tea
and it recalled to him his childhood,
so sudden and severe
all fear of death and pain were gone,
smoke from a Chinaman’s hookah,
lost in the rest of the opium den.

For me, it is nothing as pretty
(or literary)
as a biscuit dunked in tea.

For me it is cigarette smoke,
the stench pre-eminently foul
to non-smokers, though I, abstaining too,
see in its gross decay,
its redolence of illness, death,
a transubstantiation.

So sudden and severe
the great warm breast of Motherhood
emerges from its depths,
and then I am fourteen again,
almost half-asleep in an old green armchair,
while on the matching green sofa
my mother lies and smokes.