Notes About The Poem
Happy Thanksgiving
"May your days be blessed and filled with family, friends, feast, and fun."
- Poet
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Listen to poem:
Butter Loosening Into Liquid Sun
The frost is on the fodder now, a killing blight of cold.
We have crossed the river—gray, wide—
to reach the place where stories are retold
leaving the iron winter at the door.
Here the bin is full, the fire bright
we shut the night out with a single latch.
Praise the humble things that make a feast
the paper-skinned onion dissolved and gone
the invisible labor—the greatest and the least
the butter loosening into liquid sun.
We praise the sweetness pulled from stubborn ground
the heavy pumpkin, copper-fleshed, profound.
For the world begins and ends upon this wood
this scarred old table where the ghosts draw near.
My grandmother's hands, translucent in the steam
pass the bowl of something not quite here.
We carve the bird, dry, sacrificial meat
and blend our strange new spices with the sweet.
Bless the throat that swallows, the lung's slow tide
the cedar shingles holding back the rain
the kneading hands gone numb with repetition
those small liturgies we gather against the pain.
For even in the shadows or the fear
we set a place for everyone not here.
The Pilgrims crouched beside their starving fires
while Haudenosaunee blessed the Three Sisters' yield
their hungers haunt this feast like iron in the water
undrinkable, essential, in the field.
The mist has lifted. The honest work is done.
We taste the generations in gingered slice.
So praise for what breaks open and stays broken
for sight, for blindness, for the space between
for this abrading, necessary evening
for everyone we've harmed and cannot heal.
The world forgets itself here, then remembers
autumn spills its copper into winter's palms.
We will not wait for loss to teach us dying.
The harvest of the heart, the gathered store
we pay the simple, heavy human price
of loving what we have and asking nothing more.
Not grateful for our goodness, but for breaking
together in this blood-warm, breathing place.
We are the fruit returning earth, becoming sun.
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