small miracles

I've got to get this down before I forget: in my gender poem (arguably untitled so far), I had considered "small hands, soft and round // make small miracles, milk and honey" to be the weakest image and in need of tinkering. I've consider home and hearth, which are alliterative and monosyllabic but otherwise out of keeping with the general sound. I chatted with Laura tonight about how milk and honey are ambiguous as symbols of domesticity, but they invoke "female" from a frame semantics perspective fairly effectively, milk with the whole mammary thing and bees being rather matriarchal. I was pondering this on the drive home, then thinking about how Blake chooses his closed-case words very carefully, arguably more for their phonetic than semantic properties, and it hit me:

small hands, soft and round
make small miracles, milk with honey

so I get the assonance of the /I/ and invoke a personal frame that likely won't read for 99% of my audience, but is perfectly in keeping with that stanza. My mom used to make us "spiced milk" on special occasions (read: when she was affable and in the mood to be affectionate). Basically she would add some spices to milk, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and the like, heat it to a nice warm-drink temperature and stir in a spoonful of honey. I'm still of the opinion that this is one of the most delicious, soothing drinks in the history of the world and totally trumps even a good chai latte. And yet I almost never make it for myself.

It's not mine, but it will be.

**Edited @2:45 to add what seems like genius right now, but might be total crap by light of day: Hestia! It's the perfect title. I mean, sure, it's my mom and it's temperance and it's me learning to cook and clean for me instead of all the men in my life, but, really, it's totally the goddess of home and hearth! Oooo, or maybe even Vesta, from after she's been further corrupted by the Romans and less immediately understood to be all about keeping folks warm.