Good morning and Happy February!
Spoon up a hearty bowl of metaphors, savor a simile, sip a warm couplet of cocoa.
Yes, it’s poetry for breakfast! As the most important meal of the day, nothing hits the spot like “the best words in the best order.”
For our first poem of 2024, here’s a soul nourishing treat by Maryland poet Merrill Leffler. We’re looking forward to serving up another year of chewy verse to satisfy your cravings every Friday. Enjoy!
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BREAKFAST
by Merrill Leffler
In memory of William Stafford
This morning I’ll skip the bacon
and eggs and have a poem over light —
two or three if you don’t mind.
I feel my appetite coming on.
And even a stack of flapjacks
which I love — with butter
and boysenberry jam spreading
their fingers of sweetness over
the ragged edges — won’t do me now.
When this hunger’s on, only a poem
will do, one that will surprise my need
like a stranger knocking
at the door (a small knock — at first,
I hardly hear it) to ask directions,
it turns out, to this house. He’s looking
for me. Who are you I ask? Your brother
he says, the one you never knew you had
or the one who you’ve been trying to remember
all your life but somehow couldn’t recall
until now, when he arrives.
And there he is
before me smiling, holding out his arms
— and all this by chance. Do you
believe it?
So serve me up a poem friend,
but just go easy on the tropes,
for instance, synecdoche and such. A simile
or two is fine and metaphor’s all right.
A rhyming quatrain, maybe on the side
would be ok, but not too much —
they sometimes give me gas.
God I love a breakfast such as this.
It gives me a running start and keeps me going
through to dark when I’m as hungry as a horse.
But that’s another poem. Let’s eat.
~ from The Poet’s Cookbook: Recipes from Germany, edited by Grace Cavalieri and Sabine Pascarelli (Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc., 2010)
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So clever and delightful! They say man can’t live by bread alone, and this poem feeds both mind and heart.
It gives us what we didn’t even know we needed.
Don’t you love how Leffler speaks of poems in terms of “a stranger knocking at the door”? That little nudge of sudden recognition, then the realization (and joy) that something you’ve thought or felt has been given voice? Like a long lost relative, there is a marvelous kinship, this knowing — a poem is a loving human embrace put into words.
I like the warmth and playfulness, the wit of the extended metaphor — all delivered with friendly familiarity. Leffler tickles my fancy and leaves me hungry for more. What’s for lunch? 🙂
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Merrill Leffler is the author of three books of poems: Mark the Music (2012), Take Hold (1997), and Partly Pandemonium, Partly Love (1984). The publisher of Dryad Press, which has been publishing literary books since 1975, he has also guest edited issues of such literary journals as Poet Lore, Shirim, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. One of the founders of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Leffler taught literature at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Naval Academy until the early 1980s, and for more than 20 years was a science writer at the University of Maryland Sea Grant Program, which focuses on issues related to the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. He lives with his wife Ann Slayton in Takoma Park, Maryland, where he served as Poet Laureate, 2011-2018.
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The ever marvelous Mary Lee Hahn is hosting the Roundup at A(nother) Year of Reading. Stop by to check out the full menu of poetic goodness being served up around the blogosphere this week. Have a good weekend!
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