Poetry – The Hungry Philosopher

Food Poem – Recipe for a Salad by Sydney Smith

February 3, 2022Leave a comment

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate can not harm me, I have dined to-day!

“Recipe for a Salad” by Sydney Smith. from the Writer’s Almanac 2/3/2022

I love the part about the onion, lurking in the bottom, animating the whole 🙂

May you be serenely full,

Hungryphil

Food Poem – Jack Kerouac

November 3, 2021Leave a comment

“The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don't see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.”

from https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1354192-the-portable-jack-kerouac

Food Poem – Monday by Cindy Gregg

November 1, 2021Leave a comment

On this first day of November
it is cold as a cave,
the sky the color
of neutral third parties.
I am cutting carrots
for the chicken soup.
Knife against carrot
again and again
sends a plop of pennies
into the pan.
These cents,
when held to the gray light,
hold no noble president,
only stills
of some kaleidoscope
caught being pensive...
and beautiful,
in the eye of this beholder,
who did not expect
this moment of marvel
while making an early supper
for the hungry children.

Things That Cannot Die by Paige Riehl

August 29, 2019August 23, 2019Leave a comment

A spoon in a cup of tea.
Letters in yellow envelopes,
the way a hand pushed lines
into the soft paper.
Morning laughter.
A white shirt draped
over her chair.
An open window. The air.
Call of one blackbird.
Silence of another.
November. Summer.
My love for you, I say.
My love for you infinity
times a million, my son says.
Sounds of piano notes
as they rest in treetops.
The road from here to there.
Grief, that floating, lost swan.
“Things That Cannot Die” by Paige Riehl from Suspension. © Terrapin Books, 2018. From Writer’s Almanac Podcast, August 13, 2019

This is not exactly a food poem although “a spoon in a cup of tea” is referenced. It does speak to the immortal intimacy of love and loss. Small things and endless things.

May you be surrounded by things that cannot die like laughter and love,

Hungryphil

Food Poem – Carrying Water to the Field by Joyce Sutphen

July 14, 2017July 26, 20174 Comments

Poet Joyce Sutphen is able to conjure such vivid and intimate experiences through small everyday objects. I so enjoy her work. Hope you do too! Here is a poem about a mason jar of water from today’s Writers Almanac:

And on those hot afternoons in July,
when my father was out on the tractor
cultivating rows of corn, my mother
would send us out with a Mason jar
filled with ice and water, a dish towel
wrapped around it for insulation.

Like a rocket launched to an orbiting
planet, we would cut across the fields
in a trajectory calculated to intercept—
or, perhaps, even—surprise him
in his absorption with the row and the
turning always over earth beneath the blade.

He would look up and see us, throttle
down, stop, and step from the tractor
with the grace of a cowboy dismounting
his horse, and receive gratefully the jar
of water, ice cubes now melted into tiny
shards, drinking it down in a single gulp,
while we watched, mission accomplished.

“Carrying Water to the Field” by Joyce Sutphen.

The beautiful image that makes water drops look like glass sculpture is from: http://www.taylourwhite.com/2012/03/18/mason-jar-and-water/

Food Poem – What We Might Be, What We Are by X. J. Kennedy

June 30, 2015August 16, 2015Leave a comment

If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We’d not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,

But you’re just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I’m a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we’ll stay slightly remote.

“What We Might Be, What We Are” by X.J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravity. © Little Brown, 1992.

From the Writer’s Almanac, June 28, 2015

http://writersalmanac.org/page/3/

A Drink of Water by Jeffrey Harrison

March 10, 2015Leave a comment

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.

“A Drink of Water” by Jeffrey Harrison, from Into Daylight. © Tupelo Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Posted from the http://writersalmanac.org/

Coffee in the Afternoon (A Poem by Alberto Rios)

February 18, 2015Leave a comment

It was afternoon tea, with tea foods spread out
Like in the books, except that it was coffee.

She made a tin pot of cowboy coffee, from memory,
That’s what we used to call it, she said, cowboy coffee.

The grounds she pinched up in her hands, not a spoon,
And the fire on the stove she made from a match.

I sat with her and talked, but the talk was like the tea food,
A little of this and something from the other plate as well,

Always with a napkin and a thank-you. We sat and visited
And I watched her smoke cigarettes

Until the afternoon light was funny in the room,
And then we said our good-byes. The visit was liniment,

The way the tea was coffee, a confusion plain and nice,
A balm for the nerves of two people living in the world,

A balm in the tenor of its language, which spoke through
our hands
In the small lifting of our cups and our cakes to our lips.

It was simplicity, and held only what it needed.
It was a gentle visit, and I did not see her again.

“Coffee in the Afternoon” by Alberto Rios from The Theater of Night. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. From The Writers Almanac, http://writersalmanac.org/

Baking – Poem

February 16, 2015Leave a comment

On Approaching Seventy

by Joan Seliger Sidney

Watching the hands of my son
kneading challah dough
on the maple cutting board
in my kitchen, a memory

rises of my mother
bending over our kitchen table
in Flatbush, pressing, stretching,
folding flour, water, eggs

into a living elastic.
Sometimes in my dreams, Mom
appears, whispers of her mother
in her kitchen in Zurawno

in the pre-dawn dark,
by the light of the kerosene
lamp, pulling and pushing
the yeasty challah dough

until my son covers it
with a clean white cloth
and leaves it in the warm
electric oven to rise.

“On Approaching Seventy” by Joan Seliger Sidney from Bereft and Blessed. © Antrim House Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

http://writersalmanac.org/page/2/

Apple Crisp and Ice cream Happiness

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015Leave a comment

Happiness

by Wesley McNair

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle—why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy ( oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

“Happiness” by Wesley McNair from The Town of No and My Brother Running. © David R. Godine, 1998. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

from the writersalmanac.org

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