Poetry Friday: Thankful, thankful, thankful (and Joy Harjo)

Thanksgiving is on the horizon and I'm feeling so grateful for my family and for all that has transpired around our kitchen table over the years. 

At our table we have eaten, of course, but our kitchen table has been the heart of so much more. We have laughed there, yes. We have wept. We've discussed books and writing. We've spent time with our babies, our toddlers, our teens, our grown and beautiful daughters. We've considered cancer treatments, health changes, chronic illness, new ways of eating. We've discussed politics and surrealism. We have shared stories of friends, faith, art, history. We have pondered jobs and job changes, school and not-school. We have lived in our kitchen; if our table could speak, it would be overflowing with stories from the lives of the Edmistens. 

I'm so grateful for our kitchen table.  

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo captures the essence of this core, this beating heart of our shared lives, in "Perhaps the World Ends Here." 

Here's to the kitchen table, and to the happiest of Thanksgivings. May your gratitude be overflowing. 

Perhaps the World Ends Here
by Joy Harjo 

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been
    since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They 

    scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. 

    We make men at it, we make women.

(Read the rest here, at Poets.org.) 

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The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by the hostess with the mostest, Jama Rattigan. 

(Photo credit: Matthias Cooper, Pexels)