Let’s Eat - This Is What It Means

Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking
My father taught me how to eat. With his eyes, he said, “The table is not a table, but a field of ripened wheat.” Then a warm rain fell upon the field, and like a grateful congregation the stalks of grain bowed their heads. The storm departed. The sun shone and the field turned to bread. My father broke off a piece of the bread and handed it to me. “This is my body,” he said with a smile, and I took the bread from him and ate it, a symbol of his hard work. My nostrils flared. The bread was his body. He had coaxed it out of the earth with his bare hands, with his arms and legs and back. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said. “And always know that hunger is a blessing, not a curse.” I wrote a poem, and the poem became a ship upon endless waves of grain. I walked on the bread of the poem’s deck and said, “So this is what it means.” My father was pleased. “Take some more,” he said. “Yours is a good strong ship.” I continued to eat. The ship became a plow. “Work this field with your life,” he said. I walked behind the plow. The field bled, cleansing itself like an eager wound. From a great distance, my mother passed the potatoes. She passed the beans, the onions, the peppers, the tomatoes, the succulent lamb. Seeing so many good things spread before him, my father said, “My son, that is all for today’s lesson. Let’s eat now, before everything gets cold.”	Also by William Michaelian POETRY Winter Poems ISBN: 978-0-9796599-0-4 52 pages. Paper. —————————— Another Song I Know ISBN: 978-0-9796599-1-1 80 pages. Paper. —————————— Cosmopsis Books San Francisco Signed copies available Main Page Author’s Note Background Notebook A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation Flippantly Answered Questions E-mail & Parting Thoughts
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Let’s Eat — A Writer’s Guide to Cooking