Ilse

As much as dill and pickled cucumbers,
it’s the cherries that I remember most,
growing on two trees outside my window,
dark red, fragrant and so sweet.

I remember, too, the blossoms every spring.
As well as dill and pickled cucumbers
in huge jars lined up in the cellar,
you preserved cherries in alcohol for winter.

From the fresh cherries that we ate with abandon
some were stoned, an English pun I still enjoy,
apart from dill and pickled cucumbers,
and soaked in brandy in a special ceramic pot.

A Hausfrau from Cologne, red-haired firecracker,
you taught me Kölsch, old songs and jokes,
loved me as much as your own, and cherries,
as much as dill and pickled cucumbers.

Kim M. Russell, 16th October 2025

Image by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Laura, our host for this week’s Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, tells us that today is the birthday of Günter Grass who, together with Heinrich Böll and Hermann Hesse, is one of my favourite German writers. I love the poem of remembrance, ‘My Epitaph, Written in Sprigs of Dill’, which reminds me of my long-dead German foster mother and one of the typical meals she cooked. She used a lot of dill, especially when pickling gherkins.

Our challenge is to continue with the sixteenth theme and write Quaterns, a French verse form, which has a total of sixteen lines divided into four quatrains, with eight syllables per line; the rolling refrain moves consecutively through the stanzas from Line I to L2, L3, L4. The Quatern is usually unrhymed.

An optional suggestion is to engage with one of Günter Grass’s poems, for example, taking a quote as an epigram or writing an answer or response to one of his poems (for, against or along the same lines/style).

25 thoughts on “Ilse”

  3. Loving memories preserved in these lines shine as brightly as those colorful pickles and cherries this poem places before us like treasures. So beautifully conceived and written, Kim.

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  4. Loved the poem and your note after the poem. Having spent our very early married years living in the first home we ever bought, an old farmhouse on 30 acres of land….I was especially melancholic as I read this. I canned beets, tomatoes, green beans, carrotts. Had an herb garden and froze apple pies and zuchinni breads galore. Very first time I canned stewed tomatoes, I had the first 6 jars lined up on the counter when I looked out the window to our fenced in back yard and saw our German Shepherd, Toby, running, stopping, scratching, howling. I took one step outside and the smell was AWFUL. He’d been sprayed by a skunk! Best way to get rid of that smell on a dog? Bathe them in …. stewed tomatoes!!! All my hard work was poured on to that dog….good thing I loved Toby because I was practically swearing while I was doing it!!!!

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    1. That was some story, Lill! My little Jack Russell used to roll in fox excrement, and I regularly had to bathe him and throw away a ruined lead.
      I always enjoyed helping Isle with pickling and preserving. There was also a good store of beer and wine in their cellar.

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  8. Our backyard was full of cherry trees, but for us it was cherry pies! We kids pitted the cherries. My mom baked the pies. My dad ate them! (Well, actually, we all did. Best cherry pies, to this day, that I’ve ever tasted.) Loved your poem.

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  9. I loved this poem packed with preserves – which was a tradition I also grew up with – I still make the odd jar of jam (not good for my Type 2) but the days of bottling and freezing produce in season are past. I wonder how you came to be fostered by a German Hausfrau – there is so much we don’t know about our fellow pub goers that only surfaces in tantalising glimpses…

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