Food Poetry

This week's prompt at Poetry Thursday was to share poems about food. I have a few food poems. I posted my poem about Fresh Bread on an early Poetry Thursday. Click if you want to see it, I don't think I had very many readers back then. I also have a couple of poems about eggs that I rather like, but as they are being published shortly, and the magazine has first publishing rights, they will have to wait. I've started another poem in response to the prompt, but it isn't ready yet. So, I have nothing of my own to share this week (unless you click the link above). Instead, I am posting something by one of my favourite New Zealand poets, Lauris Edmond. Yes, the title mentions roses. But it's about food, really.

Those roses

Roses, the single scarlet sort,
open at the throat as if for
coolness, sprawl at the window;
you heap on my plate a pile
of potatoes, steaming and small,
smelling of mint. 'They're
basic,' you say as we go at them
lustfully, 'they grow by the door;
you have to chase meat' - and I
notice a certain vegetable poise,
not striated like the fibrous
deposits of a more strenuous growing
but smooth, opaque; placid testimony
to the sufficiency of flesh.

'Of course you do have to hunt - '
I say, thinking of hopeful
burrowings in the soil, wresting
from the clutch of its black fingernails
each creamy nugget; and we agree
on that; we're a bit languid,
munching more slowly as each
pale pod splits open and fills
us with amber warmth - one flesh
sturdily giving itself to another.
Those roses, too, they lean over us,
and the squat black pot gives
off its dull gleam, grinning
crookedly from the stove.

- Lauris Edmond