For our Sunday Poems today I have a pair of poems about feasting and family -- both before and after the meal. Both poems describe magical moments of transition in the process of turning food into feasts and feasts into loving rituals that celebrate family, the harvest, and the turn of the seasons.
The first poem, The Invention of Cuisine by Carol Muske-Dukes, reveals the moment when a woman discovers herself a creature in-between feral and domestic -- a cook before she knew what it was to cook, a hawk before it learned to hunt for the table:
"Imagine a thin woman
before bread was invented,
playing a harp of wheat in the field.
There is a stone, and behind her
the bones of the last killed,
the black bird on her shoulder
that a century later
will fly with trained and murderous intent."
With an almost prophetic vision, the woman senses the idea of food as charged with something more than sustenance.
The second piece is an audio clip of poet Sandra Gilbert reading After Thanksgiving. It is a lovely poem concerning the quiet aftermath of Thanksgiving: the food-stuffed children flying home, and the beautiful slow turning of fall into winter. To find this featured audio on Poetry Foundation's homepage, check the middle column, opposite the search function for the section: featured audio.
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