I’ve been waiting just short of a month to publish this post. Because the article first appeared in a hard copy version of November’s issue of Food & Home Entertaining, I was asked to wait until it had been pulled from the shelves. For those of you who, like me, live nowhere near an outlet that sells the magazine and asked to read my blogger-of-the-month profile, here it is.
Poetic Eggs
by Ezra Pound
I am a grave poetic hen
That lays poetic eggs
And to enhance my temperament
A little quiet begs.
We make the yolk philosophy,
True beauty the albumen.
And then gum on a shell of form
To make the screed sound human.
I’m mad about my hens. Most mornings, armed with a bowl of chopped up greens, I go out to their run for some communal clucking.
The Latin meaning for the word focus, the point at which all things come together, is fireplace. I loved reading this fact: focus = fireplace, or hearth, or that small circle of stones filled with combustible materials around which humans have gathered for millenia to keep warm, or to eat.
It rained on Thursday night. After a brittle-dry six months that cracked the earth and desiccated the surrounding bush, that cracked our lips and turned our skin to scales; after a climbing temperature that threatened to suck the life out of every living thing, it rained.
I’m delighted to announce that leading South African food magazine, Food & Home Entertaining, has selected me as their Blogger of the Month for the November issue, which hits the shelves today. Those will be shelves in South Africa, not the Zambezi Valley … yet.
Once upon a time only the leaves on a beet plant were eaten. When the vegetable hung in the Gardens of Babylon; when it was sought after by the Ancient Romans and Greeks as an aphrodisiac, it was the red-veined leaves they all wanted. Everyone, bar the occasional apothecary, cared less about the taproots.
