Sunday Supper with Shrimp poem

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit the fabulous Mona Voelkel for Roundup.

Hope to see friends old and new tomorrow 1-3 pm at Page & Palette (Fairhope, AL), where I'll be signing Some Starry Night...with its brand-new cover! (More on this next week!)

Today's ArtSpeak: WOMEN features shrimp. 

Have I mentioned before that I love seafood? Yep. I was raised on fish fry suppers at my grandparents' house in Port St. Joe, FL, and then, for the five years we lived in Folsom, LA (just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans), my father would take me on "dates" to fancyschmanzy seafood restaurants in the city. Lucky me! 

And then, on our first (blind) date, both Paul and I ordered the grilled grouper. Fate! We've been eating seafood together ever since.

However, sometimes, I get to feeling a lot of empathy for the food I'm about to eat. I've shared before about how when Rebecca Davis was editing Fresh Delicious: Poems from the Farmers' Market, she said there'd been some talk in-house that perhaps we didn't want little children empathizing too much with the food that was about to be eaten, that this might be upsetting. So we removed those poems. 

One of them—my favorite! "Strawberry Self-Portrait"—appears in 40 Poems for 40 Weeks: Integrating Meaningful Poetry and Word Ladders into Grades 3-5 Literacy edited by David L. Harrison and Timothy V. Rasinski. (Such a FABULOUS book!) You can read the poem here.

Anyhow, all this to explain that today's poem also empathizes with a food that's about to be eaten: shrimp! Thanks so much for reading.

Sunday Supper with Shrimp

Shrimp call out,

make last-minute wishes:

let their mouths be filled

with ocean—

salt & froth

tender & wild

No one hears.

And still the waves come.

- Irene Latham

Process note: Right before my scheduled time to write this, I was reading "Summer Grass" by Carl Sandburg, courtesy of the American Academy of American Poets.