Hope you find this poem that offers food like flowers as a form of healing presence, as reassuring as I do. Happy Tuesday my fellow hungry philosophers.
“What I Learned from My Mother” by Julia Kasdorf from Sleeping Preacher. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. From the Writers Almanac, June 27th, 2017 |
Yet another benefit to baking: “to make sweetness where there is none.” I also loved the part about the sweetness of babies before “their wills sprouted like mushrooms.” Hope you enjoy the poem as I do!
My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to her
command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.Desserts were her reward for endless
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.
“The scent of apple cake” by Marge Piercy from Made in Detroit. © Knopf, 2015. from the Writer’s Almanac, June 15th, 2017
Image and Recipe for teddie’s apple cake from Food52.com
| This poem beautifully illustrates the universal principle of local food. Food memories and experiences across space and time have a common language.
Have a wonderful week everyone!
“Market Day” by Linda Pastan from Carnival Evening. © Norton, 1998. From the Writer’s Almanac, June 22nd 2017
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My mother went to work each day
in a starched white dress, shoes
damped to her feet like pale
mushrooms, two blue hearts pressed
into the sponge rubber soles.
When she came back home, her nylons
streaked with runs, a spatter
of blood across her bodice,
she sat at one end of the dinner table
and let us kids serve the spaghetti, sprinkle
the parmesan, cut the buttered loaf.
We poured black wine into the bell
of her glass as she unfastened
her burgundy hair, shook her head, and began.
And over the years we mastered it, how to listen
to stories of blocked intestines
while we twirled the pasta, of saws
teething cranium, drills boring holes in bone
as we crunched the crust of our sourdough,
carved the stems off our cauliflower.
We learned the importance of balance,
how an operation depends on
cooperation and a blend of skills,
the art of passing the salt
before it is asked for.
She taught us well, so that when Mary Ellen
ran the iron over her arm, no one wasted
a moment: My brother headed straight for the ice
Our little sister uncapped the salve.
And I dialed the number under Ambulance,
my stomach turning to the smell
of singed skin, already planning the evening
meal, the raw fish thawing in its wrapper,
a perfect wedge of flesh.
From the Writer’s Almanac http://writersalmanac.org/page/3/
This is the perfect poem for today, Amani’s birthday. Happy 22nd Birthday my baby. May we all celebrate “this green, this life.”
“The First Green of Spring” by David Budbill from Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse. © Copper Canyon Press, 1999. From Writer’s Almanac on April 27th, 2017 |
Enjoy this yoga AND a food poem celebrating moderation. May we all have the wisdom to “savor every bite of grub with equal gratitude.”
“The Necessary Brevity of Pleasures” by Samuel Hazo from A Flight to Elsewhere. © Autumn House Press, 2005. From the Writers Almanac on April 25, 2017.
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I myself am an ex-wife and I’m also the wife cooking dinner during an ex-wife phone call. I feel the discomfort of intrusion from both perspectives. It is the unwelcome reminder that I am not the center of anyone’s universe as young love believes. I feel the pang of the poem and its wisdom of being the other woman either on the phone or cooking. In this case, is cooking an escape or a grounding in reality? Maybe both?
While I mince an onion, he talks with her,
planning their son’s bar mitzvah, sounding
so familiar, so nuts and bolts. Turning up the gas flame,
I sauté the onion translucent. Butter sizzles, foams,
as they go over the invitation list, names I’ve never heard.Adding a cup of Arborio, I think of white rice
thrown high in the air by the fistful. I pour
two glasses of chardonnay, one for the risotto,
one for myself, sip, then gulp. Blend.The band, flowers, menu?
Heady, I stare at the recipe to orient myself, to understand
what I am doing: Add broth, cup by cup, until absorbed.
Add Parmesan. Serve immediately.The word immediately catches my eye,
but their conversation continues, then his son
gets on the line and hangs up on him,
as I stir and stir, holding the wooden spoon.“Making Risotto for Dinner When His Ex-Wife Calls” by Kendra Tanacea from A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees. © Lost Horse Press, 2017.
From the Writer’s Almanac March 31, 2017
Tonight we find them again,
parked under the stars
(no one ever
eats inside in Heaven),
beeping the tired carhop
with her pageboy and mascara
for a paper boat of French fries
drenched in sauce,
a smashed hamburger baptized
with spices.
They’re sixteen and in love;
the night is hot,
sweet and tangy on their tongues.
Why do we stop?
They’re in Heaven, after all,
listening to the fry cook
in the kitchen
with his savory benedictions,
the AM radio playing
“Love Me Tender,” “Peggy Sue,”
unperturbed by the future with its
franchises and malls, its
conglomerates and information
highways. Is there something
we would tell them?
Here in Hamburger Heaven where
the nights go on forever,
where desire’s resurrected
and every hunger’s filled?
Wait! Do we call out?
But now they’ve seen us
close behind them with our
fervent “Thou Shalt Nots,”
our longings glaring in
the rearview mirror.
And they’ve turned on
the ignition
and they’ve floored it
and are gone.
“Hamburger Heaven” by Ronald Wallace from For a Limited Time Only. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.
When we travel we tend to notice the details, the fine print, the hidden salt and pepper shakers, better. We allow ourselves to break our own patterns and habits, we allow ourselves to try new things and accept deviations like butter on our English muffin, we allow a different world. This poem captures the sense of gratitude, awareness, and wonder on a room service tray.
If you’ve ever had one you know what I’m saying:
soggy with steam, too much butter soaking into the crevices.
At first you’re mad—you told them butter on the side—
but then you’re grateful to have it. Day after day
you eat it dry, now away, alone on business
in your overheated hotel room,
you’re grateful for the butter, indebted to strangers
wearing hair nets in a distant kitchen for slathering your muffins,
tucking them into a cloth napkin, placed in a mesh basket,
variety of colorful jams for you to choose.
It’s enough joy just to take that first bite, if you’re lucky
it’s still warm even after the long elevator ride.
If you’re lucky there’s a yellow single stem rose in a bud vase,
shiny silverware poking out of the starched white napkin.
Why give me a fork, you think? You ordered coffee and a muffin,
why complicate it with a fork? And then you spot the tiny
salt & pepper shakers in the shadow of the napkin, and you wonder,
does anyone, no matter how troubled, put salt & pepper
on their English Muffins? Maybe.
Maybe when they’re far from home.“Room Service English Muffins” by Kim Dower from Air Kissing on Mars. © Red Hen Press, 2010. From the Writer’s Almanac http://writersalmanac.org/page/2/
My new borrowed mantra: “You cannot write until you know how to inhabit your own experience” is from Jane Hirshfield. According to today’s Writer’s Almanac, she practiced Zen Buddhism for 8 years before returning to poetry.
Happy Birthday Ms. Hirshfield! This is her poem, Sweater. I hope to be “lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on” like her sweater. Enjoy!
What is asked of one is not what is asked of another.
A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer,
a coffee cup sits to the left or the right of the workspace,
making its pale Saturn rings of now and before.
Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,
day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool.
Lucky still, the one who writes later, shaking. Acrobatic at last, the
sweater,
elastic as breath that enters what shape it is asked to.
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.
Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,
stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical
pullings on.“Sweater” by Jane Hirshfield from Come, Thief. © Knopf, 2011.
Wishing you a happy weekend,
Hungryphil
The Hungry Philosopher 