A Buddhist Grace or What’s Wrong With This Picture - Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

A Buddhist Grace 
   or What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Somehow I never make it through this prayer:

Potatoes, celery, carrots, onions,
each tenderly coaxed
from soft soil aerated by your hand.
Thank you farmer for your work,
I am connected to you
through this fine stew
unified by its good red burgundy stock.
Thank you vintners and wine makers
for your part in this symphony
conducted with the tang of a bay leaf.

Let’s see—allow me to consider what else
for which to be thankful in my
		deep dish of pungent stew—
—ah the succulence of fall-apart beef
nurtured to morseled chunks by your hand,
my cook, my uniter of all components.

Thank you cattle for offering yourselves as sacrifice.
Thank you slaughterhouse workers
			wading ankle-deep in blood.
Thank you, those of you with the courage 
		to impersonally slay.
Thank you to the packers hanging carcasses on hooks.
Thank you for the cutters 
who hew beef bodies
			as if they were so many grades 
and cuts of lumber.
Thank you, all of you, for the intimate part
you play in my meal and my life this day.

	- Ed Coletti