Before You Eat-Carrots-The Butter Road-An Irish Dinner
Fedo, David & Flanders, Jane & Galvin, Martin & Murphy, Peter E.
Peter E. Murphy Before You Eat I suppose you expect me to listen To the blessings of food before You eat, the invoice of rituals, the Summoning of invisible needs to this table. Well, we'll...
...Such appetites as these stick in the throat like shards of bone...
...The seeds snuggle down easily...
...David Fedo Carrots in the backyard surrounded by a ragged hedge grown neck high my father and I turn the cool earth over...
...My father's shirt is off...
...Neither would my father, who says he turns thirteen every time he walks along the Butter Road, whistling...
...They were harvested in September stored in a big crock in the cellar...
...Slugs and earthworms dig for cover: our shovels are merciless...
...I rake away the clumps of grass and stones, turn on the sprinkler...
...His mother still needs a little something from the store, though she's been dead now almost twenty years...
...What's needed in this place, the children guess, is an Irish mess of homeblown potatoes, brown mountains in the children's eyes, that open like tulips sweet and white from the black, begrudging land...
...Chew me—I beg of you...
...Have I ever told you about the rivers of cider, the abattoirs of cake...
...In such silence our carrots each year overcame Minnesota winters Jane Flanders The Butter Road It is everything that occurs to youtreacherous, tantalizing— that shimmer in the sun is no mirage but the pure stuff, waiting for pancakes...
...They themselves they see pecking at feed, a father full of butchers' knives, scarring the table with his scowls...
...Our only crop will be carrots...
...She doesn't lie either...
...My father dozes in a canvas lawn chair...
...I wouldn't lie to you, not about Pennsylvania, not in this poem anyway...
...Martin Galvin An Irish Dinner This is what the children pay to see, a brooding table bent at chicken bones, their own milk-mother slumped at gravy...
...What's needed here, the children know, is something soft and strong to blunt dry murder...
...Long ago in this same but different earth we grew carrots as sweet as apples...
...The sharp shivs corked safe in skins will then slide harmless past their parents, past their own hawked necks...
...Commonweal: 154...
...The sun warms us as we work...
...Well, we'll have none of that name calling here...
...A neighbor, watching from the hedge, says there hasn't been a garden here in twenty years...
...Chew me and grow...
...Open your eyes, look out on this table—crusty Body of bread, soft flesh of cheese—The work I do is before you...
...Everything you desire is already conceived In the eyes of potatoes, the arms of celery, The hearts of lettuce—contained already—The Lamb's back, the pig's head, the steer's rib...
...We plant carrots in even rows...
...I can see the patches of prickly white hair on his back...
...That's how it is with us country folk...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
