There may or may not be a method to this madness.

Grace

Because my grandmother made me

the breakfast her mother made her,

when I crack the eggs, pat the butter

on the toast, and remember the bacon

to cast iron, to fork, to plate, to tongue,

my great grandmother moves my hands

to whisk, to spatula, to biscuit ring,

and I move her hands too, making

her mess, so the syllable of batter

I’ll find tomorrow beneath the fridge

and the strew of salt and oil are all

memorials, like the pan-fried chicken

that whistles in the grease in the voice

of my best friend’s grandmother

like a midnight mockingbird,

and the smoke from the grill

is the smell of my father coming home

from the furnace and the tang

of vinegar and char is the smell

of Birmingham, the smell

of coming home, of history, redolent

as the salt of black-and-white film

when I unwrap the sandwich

from the wax-paper the wax-paper

crackling like the cold grass

along the Selma to Montgomery road,

like the foil that held

Medgar’s last meal, a square of tin

that is just the ghost of that barbecue

I can imagine to my tongue

when I stand at the pit with my brother

and think of all the hands and mouths

and breaths of air that sharpened

this flavor and handed it down to us,

I feel all those hands inside

my hands when it’s time to spread

the table linen or lift a coffin rail

and when the smoke billows from the pit

I think of my uncle, I think of my uncle

rising, not falling, when I raise

the buttermilk and the cornmeal to the light

before giving them to the skillet

and sometimes I say the recipe

to the air and sometimes I say his name

or her name or her name

and sometimes I just set the table

because meals are memorials

that teach us how to move,

history moves in us as we raise

our voices and then our glasses

to pour a little out for those

who poured out everything for us,

we pour ourselves for them,

so they can eat again.

If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.

crimsun:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)

Read More

Oh my word, I am actually SO BAD at this!