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ingredients i prepared a simple supper but with great love i cooked that main meat of refined wheat durum semolina, traded as rotini an Italian pasta to go with beef, a grace from a Canadian cow grazed in prairie grass, spiced with herbs from the hunted tropics: ginger, garlic, turmeric, and coriander powdered, with red pepper powder and red pepper crushed, black pepper (also powdered), added to the onion chopped, fennel, fenugreek, and cumin (all seeds), and the magical mustard, adding leaves chopped: basil, chives and parsley, with garam masala, a Bharat special, sprinkled with hardly a pinch of salt before adding the slow-cooked African beans and Mexican sauce: chopped and crushed tomato, and boiled potato, after being sautéed in the US canola oil to enhance the taste of minerals and more already in my pan: folate, iron, niacin, riboflavin, and thiamine already mixed in carbohydrate, the main with Chinese additives: citric, soy, and seasonings unlisted; likewise the two sealed cans that curtailed my sprinkling salt for supper came with corn starch, sugar, more spices and blackstrap molasses, and a poetic muse  Henry Victor, a Canadian, originally a Tamil Sri Lankan, is a retired Professor and Priest (Anglican), indulges in poetry.
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Testimony Illumination is a sudden thing. We can only think, think and wait, and all the while we move, touching this thing, holding that paperweight, running a hand through hair, pulling chin, nose, ears, biting lips, tapping feet, always touching. I’d think, strange how I can touch these and not god. My skin then was hide, felt nothing of god. Or was it god’s skin like an orange, fragrant, pitted bitter peel before the cool sweet god-juice? A dark night passed and a hot day came, heat like the horror of a beggar on a white afternoon eating at the public dustbin, and dry, thick in the throat, burning my feet through my shoes. And a friend said you must peel the orange—here, this way. I followed her closely and did the same, finding the flesh inside touched each still dry lobe, in wonder and bit at last, drank deeply. This was my first taste of god. Harbour Line, Mumbai Come, come to Cotton Green, a heaven. Here are empty beggars with yellow eyes. And there, just a little down the line at Currey Road, they look for food in the parked garbage trucks waiting to be washed. To the years coming and going Blessed, walked on stars and coals mind a red-hot rose opened in the cold burned, fell was the story that I tell not the king but Falstaff jugs in hands, laughed drank with fear, ate with dust tongue a blade, everything and I could burst ran for miles in bared teeth so she and I could meet. Come in this year, find a seat a blessing cup. On the fire there is meat.  Poet Gavin Barrett is a Canadian immigrant poet of colour, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Anglo-Indian and Goan-East-African parents. He is the author of Understan (Mawenzi House, 2020), a CBC Books recommendation, and co-curator of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings, a literary reading series that promotes IBPOC voices in Canadian literature.
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AboutThe poems that follow are powerful evidence that Poetry Speaks Back to Hunger! Archives
October 2022
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