Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.
Topic: Write a poem inspired by food. Want to make it harder?
Difficulty level 1: don’t use the words “food, taste, or smell.” Difficulty level 2: don’t say the name of your chosen food (the reader should be able to figure it out from clues)
Difficulty level 3: the true meaning of the poem is not actually about food or eating.
Difficulty level 4: make it fit a specific form of your choice (haiku, sonnet, acrostic, ballad etc)
Difficulty level 5: all of the above!!! What??!!!!!
Form : any Line requirements: any
Questions?
The Soufflé isn’t the soufflé; the soufflé is the recipe. --Clara
We thought they had died off,
no more Sunday lunch invites
spooned into gravy, smeared over lamb,
relaxing after with a good red
while the dog cried for leftovers.
There's parts of our garden
I haven't visited in a while
too much work, too many weeds
but today there's a southerly breeze
that takes me back to that table.
Just for a moment you are with me
and I hear the kitchen clatter,
see faces each in its own place.
I follow that path and find you
not gone at all, just out of sight.
I shout to the house
"Guess what? they came back"
crush a handful and inhale
as if to store more moments. "Thank you"
I said as if the leaves could hear me.
If your undies fer you've been smoking through em, don't peg em out
Crown of globalistic fusion
Hot-fried yet American
Overlaid with crispy sproutings
Pushed out worldwide swiftly flies.
Savory and untransparent
Ultimately everywhere:
Eggs and wet meat cooked together
Yield a million breathless sighs.
My children are staring at me again
like miniature paleontologists digging
through the fossil record
of my many objectional choices.
They wipe the dust from my bones
and carefully reassemble the skeleton.
Adjusting their calipers, they set the ribcage
in place. Frowning to inform me
that continuing to eat ridged potato chips
with French onion dip is why I don’t have ripped abs.
They resolve that I should not eat
this bag of chips, but instead devout myself,
like the wrongly named brontosaurus, to a salad—
this from children who seem allergic to lettuce.
I close my eyes and think back to the primordial forests
of my youth and pray for the asteroid.
