Potato
by Jane Kenyon
In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been
redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.
When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—
looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.
Happy Thanksgiving. I hope this Thanksgiving finds you surrounded by friends and family bound together by gratitude, sharing food and fellowship. Will you say a prayer of thanksgiving as you sit down together to eat? Aloud or silently? What are you grateful for and to whom do you want to bestow a prayer gratitude? Gratefulness and thankfulness are founded on awareness. Without being aware of how we are connected to our communities, our families, our co-workers our friends, we can’t be thankful.
Is not prayer also a study of truth,–a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will god go forth anew into creation.Ralph Waldo Emerson
In an increasingly secular world, where talk of God and gratitude make some at our tables uncomfortable, invite everyone to speak their truth on what they are thankful for, regardless if the only divinity is desert and your personal prayer of thanksgiving is said in silence with eyes wide open smiling at each of the people present at your table.
Take the time this holiday weekend to give thanks. Pick up the phone and call an old friend. Touch base with the elderly family member that might be feeling isolated. Commune with nature and talk a walk of thanksgiving – thinking about all you have to be grateful for in your life.
Happy Thanksgiving.
The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
Fourteen Lines 