This poem reverses the idea that we eat to nourish the body and instead suggests we have a body in order to eat. I love the celebration of embodied sensual experience! I hope you do too 🙂

It has its attractions,
chiefly visual: all those

shapes and lines, hunks
of color and light (the way

the gold light falls across
the lawn in early summer,

the iridescent blue floating
on the lake at sunset),

and being alive seems
to be a necessity if you want

to sit in the sun or rub your
toes in the sand at the beach.

You need to be breathing
in order to eat paella and

drink sangria, and making love
is quite impossible without

a body, unless you are one
of those, given – like gold –
to spin in airy thinness forever.

“The Idea of Living” by Joyce Sutphen from Modern Love & Other Myths. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

From the Writer’s Almanac http://writersalmanac.org/page/4/