Food Poetry

It was a long while before I took a chance

to taste the dirt umbrellas of my youth

as they sat there on the plate in

their dung coloured glory, swimming in

the pale liquid of their demise.

It was easier to gulp down the

sharp sweetness of the addictive toxic squares

that greeted my mornings,

to savour the sting of artifice

in the quiet moments before school.

A Farmer’s Market found in a forest off a country road near the town of St. Jacobs in Ontario, Canada.

I wanted to share a poem that I wrote at the workshop I attended recently (on Food Poetry) at the “West End Food Festival” here in Vancouver, B.C. We were challenged to change the name of common foods in our poems and as a group we came up with some pretty interesting new names – I chose to write about ” dirt umbrellas/mushrooms” and “addictive toxic squares/pop tarts” as well as try to capture a childhood memory!