Food Poems: Saying Grace, by EF

Saying Grace

Give me your controlled rot,
ruby-speckled rows of aging
beef, bottles seasoned in dust--
veins branch penicillin-blue
through spring’s milk, a washed-rind
bite that only comes with time.

Give me your unborn--
your unlaid eggs nestled
in the soup hen, tone of topaz
that never saw the sun--

hand me a pearl spoon
of a million yet-to-be sturgeon
massaged through a sieve with
malossol’s touch of salt--

even the inky urchin cracked
in spiky halves will yield
the secrets to her young--briny,
potential-rich, that taste of perpetuation,
of what was to become life.

No one is innocent.
The local August tomato--
God-fearing, luscious red--
that sweetness, those jellied seeds
running down your chin
they weren’t meant for you. 

Repent?  Hardly.  Who are you
to apologize to?  But say thank you,
for Chrissake, and we’re not talking
to God, unless God was a tomato
flushed with pride, grown
by knowing, gnarled hands.

Comments

[from b e h i n d]

The Mighty Sarlacc is always h u n g ry

[SSFL]

Your poem is beautiful!