Stone Soup

My granma was a master of cobbling 
broth; nine weans, nae onions, yet somehow knew
how to sook umami from a pebble. 
Spurtle-thirled in the scullery, she’d stew
and stir for hours, skimming off the scum,
the caul that hallowed the villagers’ haul.
Everyone chipped in — stray dogs offered up
ancestors’ bones, on fancy days the coal
merchant sent soot for croutons. The day
she died I was frantic in a foreign
kitchen, downloading instructions on ways 
to gut a sonnet. She must have wondered
what she’d spawned, exactly when poverty,
cradles and ladles turned to poetry.