The Pots and Plates of Every Day

THE POTS and PLATES of EVERY DAY

For my mother

Seventy-two labors brought us this food.
We should know how it comes to us.
—Zen Meal Chant

Gather round and share this meal
Your joys and your sorrows I make mine.
—The Gate of Sweet Nectar

I

The pot fills me with wonder.
Open and empty like the sky
it shares its upright heart.
It cannot turn away from hunger--
always its long hand reaches out
like the sun or gusting wind.
No one is turned away--
it is born to serve.

Scorched black and cinnamon
on the bottom, and inside
scoured paths of shooting stars,
the pot’s sides glinting silver
like rain through sun in summer,
the wooden handle worn from
decades of dedicated work--
how radiant the pot awake
on the stove.

Sharing its mineral life with mountains,
the pot becomes cloud-hung distances
and feeds the hungry in all realms.
The pot is pressed into service on stoves
in homes, hospitals, and prisons or over
open fires after a day’s trek
fleeing violence or drought.
Always moving toward the fire
the pot offers the warmth
and savor of being alive,
of sharing a meal.

Within the pot hot water for tea
or nutty oatmeal, warm lentils or black
beans with garlic, steaming broccoli,
fragrant soups, sauteing onions,
boiling corn, or steeping broth.
The pot nurses us in health and illness,
putting food in the bellies of the wise
and foolish, the kind and unkind.
The pot’s extended hand will shake
any hand and offer comfort.

Dinner is ready!

Come and receive the universe itself.
Within the pot not only vegetables
and grains but the earth and sky
that grew them—the red sun of summer,
the sheening rains of autumn,
the rounding snow uncovering worlds
of absence and silence, the subtleties
of moonlight with plants like oceans waving
in leaf-tide and the spring star Altair
illuminating and enriching the soil,
mentored by a chilled earthworm,
who imparts its wisdom then snugs
up to an onion bulb and grows warm.
The serene pot holds the whole of life.

II

The pot sees clearly what needs
to be done but it cannot provide solace
alone. Another, sleeves rolled up,
must take its hand for cooking to begin.
We come alive only by connecting.
The pot lives by grace and gleams
like the moon by reflected light--
patient and mysterious
on the white stove of everyday life.

The wooden spoon on the counter,
the pot’s companion, open as a palm
and like the pot, reaching out,
must also wait for another’s hands.
More ancient than fork or knife
and more kind, the slender spoon
lathed from beech and lightly stained
with turmeric glows with ardor preparing
the meal—offering its dance to the pot
and to the spirited hand of its partner.
Close by, knobs of garlic nod delight
and sinuous salt and pepper
sentinels gather their wits.

The pot’s timeless calling is imbued with humor--
it is after all only a pot, and unadorned,
disappearing into service. Laughing at itself
the pot reaches out to those in need
of conversation and laughter
to keep their meals warm.

III

Meet a few of the cooks.

Thinning white hair, blue eyes,
masked, he boils spaghetti in huge pots
in a hospital kitchen for staff caring
for COVID patients. Outside, a refrigerated
truck serves as overflow morgue.
Seeing faces exhausted beneath
shields, he bows his head
and weeps.

A former cook at a casino who lost
her job cooks dinner for her girls--
a soup her mother made her—fried pasta shells,
tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and water.
The younger child sets out a bowl and
spoon for her dreadlocked doll who hungers
too for the ceremonies of daily life.

A boy named Lucky, youngest of four,
breaking from his online classes,
stirs a simple syrup for lemonade.
lll with cancer, his mother reads aloud
the recipe and watches lemons roll
across the long white counter like small suns
in the eternal moment with her son.

Fleeing drought, crops ruined,
they stop for a break on the outskirts
of a town after finding no food
and boil water for coffee.
Backpacks for pillows,
he, his wife, and their girl named
Rosa rest before resuming their route,
hoping for food tomorrow.
Their life on the road toward life
consists only of tomorrows.
There are no todays.

A brown-skinned man in solitary
prays for the well-being of the cook
who heated his green beans and hotdog.
That’s better than some folks get.
But the cockroaches--
I know them have joys and sadness,
he says, coaxing one to leave his cell.
But wrong house, go next door
he tells her. Sh-h-h-h! . . .
Dakota don’t need to know.

Late at night an older woman scoops
water from her basement as rains
batter her home. A sleeve on her
knee since the last hurricane.
Another storm brewing.
The swaying bulb blinks out--
light is exhausted too--
she says and feels her way upstairs.
She makes out her pot waiting
on the stove. Maybe its medicine
in the morning?

At the shelter a man cleaning a pot
watches as the men eat their oatmeal
then begin to go separate ways.
The last to leave, a carpenter, his tools
stolen from his truck, then the truck
stolen. Carrying a worn blanket,
he hunts for cardboard to slip
beneath at night. Just help me,
he prays. Just a little OK?

Somewhere in heaven Miss Cissy
cooks chicken stew for her son George.
You were there for me, he says.
I heard you call out—I’m not far away.
I put fresh sheets on your bed.
George, before we eat offer a prayer.
Dear God thank you for our breaths
which nothing can extinguish
and for this hearty food.
They both gaze out over heaven
at all the black hands reaching down
to hold all the black hands reaching up--
those jailed and those still marching,
until they finally return home,
and heat leftovers for dinner.
Cissy smiles at her son George Perry.
Please pass the stew, he says.

IV

Distressed that many have no food,
the pot sighs a vast aspiration to feed everyone--
the scared, the left behind, those alone,
the families in line in cars for hours for meals,
those owning neither cars nor meals,
their frightened children,
those dying from Covid starved for life,
those starved for love or justice,
and the ravaged planet itself.

Intensifying its efforts the pot reaches out
with a thousand arms—praying that sustenance
for all beings be expanded beyond measure.
We clasp the extended hand of the pot
and together move toward coiled lightning.
Shaking hands with the pot, we shake
hands with the boundless universe.
The pot ignites its mineral roots--
stars combusting into being after the Big Bang--
both heaven and earth heat the green beans
and the chicken stew and the bountiful food
and tenderness outside time.

V

Near the window on the white counter
the star-flung pot recuperates with friends
in the early morning. Open like a valley,
the pot fills with bird song.
From the near-by grass quiet breathing
and the sounds of pebbles alive
and reaching out with pebble hands
to the silent strangeness of clouds.

And inside, from the cutting board
with incised verticals like pouring
rain a soothing thrumming.
From the green ancestral branches
of the wooden spoon a buoyant silence.
The turquoise kitchen walls in
lacquered shadow sing by gleaming.
The soaring songs of pots and pebbles,
walls, clouds, cutting boards, and spoons.

Just when we do not speak but slip free
of thinking and sentience,
we begin to hear the inconceivable
music of the insentient--
their no striving after movement or gain,
an elegance of nothing extra
in a world addicted to greed,
their ebullient service to life and
wondrous receptivity to being,
their beyond human teaching.
This myriad-voiced radiance of silence
of the deepest kindness and ease
emanates from the pot and its friends
near the patio and in the small
kitchen in the early morning.

VI

I watch bubbles bob above the singing
water, pot ablaze, as steam rises
warming my face. With unwavering effort
the pot breathes hard, holding nothing back.
It takes my hand and with the other
I pour green lentils into the reeling cauldron,
then seize the cometlike spoon and stir.
The woman feeding her family pasta soup
and the man in prison eating his beans
alone and praying for the cook—how are they?
I cover the simmering pot and wait.

Such varied ingredients at hand are
poured into pots across the worlds.
Magnanimous as the ocean the pot
welcomes everything, turning nothing away,
receiving all ingredients without question.
In this everyday life of a minor spiral arm
of the Milky Way which houses our
little corner of earth and sun and stars,
soon I uncover the pot then sit down
in gratitude to enjoy my warm lunch
of lentils and thyme.

VII

As the pot reaches out we know it more
intimately—see who we are more clearly.
Just as the pot reaches out to us, we reach
out to all who hunger in any form.
We reach out to the anguished, the struggling.
We reach out to families with no jobs
freezing in line at pantries of food.
We reach out to the old dying without
the touch of a hand or song of a loving voice.
We reach out to dying birds, rhinos, and seas.

As we reach out we see that all the others
are also reaching out, bestowing gifts.
Why had we not seen this before?
Like the long-armed pots, trees reach out
to the light and dark of arriving skies.

The drift of seas reaches out to the drift of seasons.
The mountains of Earth reach out to emptiness
and the mountains of Mars. Our warm stoves
reach out to our wider home, our warm bridge of stars.
Shadows reach out to the light offering rest
from its unceasing play of creation
We live only within this reach of gifts.

VIII

All of life affirms life and freshness--
even the virus quickens compassion.
Is there anything that is not alive and
utterly generous? Braided as one
insentient and sentient, indistinguishable.
We throw open doors and floors, tear off the roof
pull down the open sky and let life stream in.
We are the pots, the pebbles, and the poise
of cutting boards, and they are us--
the oneness of our ordinary life originating
beyond the stars. All things share
a silent music and service and reach out
to each other with radiance.

IX

Together we prepare the supreme meal
for one another, holding nothing back.
We extend even our fears and darkness,
our failures to reach out, as a blade of
grass shares shadows and a hill its loneliness.
With courage and kindness like the pot,
we sustain and encourage life.

Whatever food satisfies our hungers,
whatever succor the flower or moon requires,
we offer and receive from each other.
Quiet in mystery, our timeless origins
ignite the light and code of life, embedding
in the DNA of every emerging cell of
our vast, connected life compassion.
We are the love the universe pours into us
and into the pots and plates of every day.

We take our places at the table of the worlds.
Even the freshening wind sits down with us.
We dine on a feast of every taste and fragrance.
Led by birds, songs flare praising this inexhaustible
meal which resolves every thirst and hunger.
As we savor the best wine from the Big Dipper
exquisitely aged over billions of years, we share
our joys and sorrows, and deep gratitude.
Laughter rises like a fountain of shining water.

The unsurpassable peace of pots

__________________________

Susan KōDō Efird
early spring 2021
Copyright © 2021 Susan L. Efird