Llewellyn McKernan has a master's degree in creative writing from Brown University. She has had four poetry books published
for adults and four for children. Her poems have been included in over forty anthologies and has won many prizes, awards, and honors.
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WHEN THE DEAD SPEAK OF THE WORLD AT LARGE
They mean
the geography of the plate,
the cliffs of sweet corn,
the quaint gravy creeks, their
potato plateaus, meaty fields
in all their autumnal
splendor.
They praise
the invention of cloth streets,
the sacred space between
the glass tower, with its ice
elevators, and the big white
hand that reaches
for it.
They salute
the solitude of the knife
without the beef, the spoon rising
between the plate and the tongue,
the fork whose prongs pierce
the raw or cooked, the ordinary
omelet or exotic
sushi.
They eulogize the world of the table! Its
wounded pride when no one sits
down for dinner except
the giant baby, whose quick soft swallows
avow the absence of birds,
except for the one
roasting in the oven.
It’s here
the napkin serves
the lips so well, wipes off
the foolish leftovers, the fingertips
that later touch so tenderly
the beloved’s huge face.
Here food
believes in what it is doing.
It concentrates on dishware until
something else accrues to it, something
larger that seems to come from
outside, and the ghost of a mouth
decides it’s hungry, and grows
wide as appetite’s
myths and legends.