Thanksgiving
- Thanksgiving
There are many parched lips as the cup of human kindness empties. So little milk, this year
the main course consists of boiled greens, no salt, and a tantalizing meat. It stinks.
Fat flies link a pyramid above the rotting flesh.
On each of the round clothed tables a bouquet of silk roses plucked by the hands of women working in El Salvador, Sri Lanka, the Cameroons.
I will become a vegetarian.
What of this pain? These sharp slaps on the knee? Sleet comes a hard, fast rain like laughter erupting in a prison yard.
Paradise to you, bub. But to me, a mystic’s splendid guitar.
Patricia Spears Jones is author of a play, Mother, and two volumes of poems, Mythologizing Always and The Weather That Kills. Her work has also been published in such periodicals as The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Black Scholar, Hanging Loose, and Journal of Southern Culture. She teaches a poetry seminar at Sarah Lawrence College.
Footnotes
© Patricia Spears Jones, August 1996.
