National Poetry Month Day 12: “Feast Day” by Rita Mae Reese
Feast Day
for Flannery O’Connor
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When we eat wheat we devour the sun
so in this room filled with permanent flowers
let us celebrate not with fasting
but with Red Sammy Butts’ barbecue.
Lord, let us sink to our knees under the weight
of Southern appetites. Let us devour
meatballs & turnip greens, rum balls & goose eggs
all brined in the salt of resurrection.
Let us fill our hollow legs with pink chiffon pie
& Cokes spiked with coffee.
Let us devour the landscape–
every cotton field in Georgia
& beyond, every real & imagined plantation
every pig farm & waiting room.
May we eat & eat & eat Lord,
& make no end of this, her hunger.
-Rita Mae Reese
Rita Mae Reese has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family.
Her first book, The Alphabet Conspiracy, is available from Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.