Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet, poem by Anne Caston

SUNDAY BRUNCH AT THE OLD COUNTRY BUFFET
by Anne Caston 

              Madison, Wisconsin, 1996

Here is a genial congregation,
well fed and rosy with health and appetite,
robust children in tow. They have come
and all the generations of them, to be fed,
their old ones too who are eligible now
for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.
Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one,
heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.

Here there is good will; here peace
on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits
of the gardens of America’s heartland. Here is abundance,
here is the promised
land of milk and honey, out of which
a flank of the fatted calf, thick still
on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction
over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.

SOURCE: “Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet” appears in Anne Caston’s collection Flying Out with the Wounded (New York University Press, 1997), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne Caston is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry and a teacher in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of  Flying Out With The Wounded (New York University Press, 1997) and Judah’s Lion (Toad Hall Press, 2009, second edition). Her third collection, Prodigal, is forthcoming early in 2014 from Aldrich Press. Caston’s writing often pulls from her experiences as a former nurse, as a mother of four, and as a Southern woman raised among Southern Baptists. She’s currently working on a memoir entitled Deep Dixie: A Southerner’s Take On Life, Romance, Faith, Friendship, Family, And Coming-of-Age Among Southern Baptists.

Early Sunday Morning, poem by Edward Hirsch

EARLY SUNDAY MORNING
By Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot
but now I’m one of those chumps.
 
No one cares about my old humiliations
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.
 
It’s like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up
 
early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else’s motorcycle
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.
 
And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early morning risers
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter. 

SOURCE: “Early Sunday Morning” appears in Edward Hirsch’s collection The Living Fire (Knopf, 2010), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Cup of Blue” by Sebastian Lartiste. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote the national best seller How to Read a Poem. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.

Sunday Morning, poem by Donna Hilbert

SUNDAY MORNING
by Donna Hilbert

So intense, the morning sun
through stained glass
panels of my bedroom doors,
the lenses in my glasses
resting on the nightstand
have darkened in response.
(I won’t mention the play
of pink and purple light
on the walls!) My first
thought as I awaken is lucid:
my life is perfect. I bless
this fragile moment then arise
to the day which might
prove otherwise. 

SOURCE: “Sunday Morning” appears in Donna Hilbert‘s collection Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Pearl Editions, 2003), available at Amazon.com.