Poetry Thursday #3

Today’s poetry challenge is to reuse a line from another blogger’s poem which has been posted at the site, and then leave one of mine for someone else to use. There were about 40 possibilities when I stopped by to look, and I chose the line “resting in a clean white bowl.” [Megan] I carried the sentence with me on a scrap of paper. At one point, I was going to fill the bowl with steaming ears of sweet corn, and then write a lament about ethanol--preferring not to see golden grain streaming out tail pipes. But it was truly an awful impulse and I squelch it.

When I was at the library yesterday I noticed there were 30 cookbook titles on the new book shelf and another 18 in the nearby nutrition classification. Certainly overkill in a society concerned with obesity. (The more variety, the more you eat.) I jotted down a few titles, on the same scrap with my line--i.e., "The Kitchen Diaries," and "Wrestling with gravy." Today when I got out my clean white bowl, it was filled to overflowing with gravy! Gravy has been on my list of foods to avoid for the last 3 months. I moved the word “resting” to another line.

The Kitchen Diaries

Wrestling with gravy
in a clean white bowl
my finger wipes a smudge
on resting lips.
I swoon.
My tongue is pleased
to hold a moment of
sensuous memories
from waiting hips.