Begging Bowl

Seeing the poem printed below his name

in a prominent magazine, the poet somehow

convinces himself that the poem is in fact

his own creation. He believes that his hours

of hard work—the joyful labor of pushing words

around on the page, of pacing out the lines

and listening to alternate rhythms—

have earned him the right to call the poem his.

How soon he forgets the mid-winter morning

of the poem’s birth, when he had lurched

out into the cold, splintered begging bowl

in hand, and stumbled into the marketplace,

his belly empty as an old wineskin. And

how quickly he replaces the face

of the old merchant who took pity on him,

the wrinkled and weathered face of the one

who lifted a paddle of steaming rice

into his meager bowl, with his own face.

Somehow between that gracious moment

and this, the poet devised the heretical fiction

of himself planting the rice kernels, cultivating

the paddy, harvesting the crop, then

cooking the rice over an open fire on the night

of a full moon. But you and I both know

that even as he reads the poem now printed

below his name in a prominent magazine,

the old emptiness in his belly returns, and

the poet, like a supplicant at some ancient altar,

silently holds forth his little wooden bowl.

© copyright 2007 David Denny

__________

Published in Atlanta Review

__________

Click here for next poem: Pig in a Dutch Oven