How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. – Darl in As I Lay Dying
Prompt: What does home look like for you? Is it a country? A room? A particular house? Perhaps it is people. A relationship. Maybe it’s the hereafter. When you think of home, what images surface? You might want to begin with the statement, “I’m thinking of home.” But before you start, read my poem below and also check out Philip Larkin’s Home Is So Sad.
Suppertime
—after Horace Pippin’s Family Supper (USA), 1946
I remember our evenings around the table,
Daddy asking the Lord’s blessings upon the food,
heads bowed, not a single movement, even from
the littlest child. Not his typical blessing, just
a lean thank-you for these and all other blessings
that the meat not grow cold nor hunger swell
in his belly. Simplicity honored the table
with her chipped plates, her dingy, pot-liquor-
stained table covering, her fruit-painted Ball
jelly jars serving as iced tea glasses. Always
biscuits and sugarcane syrup, often red-eye ham
gravy or golden-crusted chicken, sometimes quail or
rabbit or turkey or squirrel. Occasionally, mounds
of fresh water mullet or river catfish graced the table,
accessorized with deep-fried, sweet onion-filled,
yellow-meal corn dodgers. Oh, to go back, to sit
around the supper table, my family of eleven,
raising a jelly-jar toast and sopping syrup with bread
made with strong and tender hands. To glean every morsel
of conversation, to suck the marrow from every joy and
sorrow, to stash away life for future famines.