Thanksgiving Dinner Preparations

Chopping onions for stuffing.

Today along with Thanksgiving preparations and visiting with the family, I have been reading appropriate poetry from The Poetry Foundation website. I’ve read several poems about autumn, about the history and meaning of Thanksgiving, and to go with my first bit of work (chopping onions) I read a few poems about onions. Here are a few lines from the poem that fits with what I’m doing. If you are in the mood for a poem about the holiday, see this page: Thanksgiving Poems. I may post more later. Or not.

 Onions

BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS

How easily happiness begins by   

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   

slithers and swirls across the floor   

of the sauté pan, especially if its   

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   

or chutney (from the Sanskrit

chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   

go limp and then nacreous

and then what cookbooks call clear,   

though if they were eyes you could see

 

……..

   

This is the best domestic perfume.   

You sit down to eat with a rumor

of onions still on your twice-washed   

hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   

endurance. It’s there when you clean up   

and rinse the wine glasses and make   

a joke, and you leave the minutest   

whiff of it on the light switch,

later, when you climb the stairs.