Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day: Poems

Poetry. African American Studies. To be instructed by exhortation in scripture from a pulpit is a return to fundamentals; Bryant loves to riff in short exhortations, treatises, assays on the controversial, on the impolitic... Bryant is at heart a teacher; he believes in daylight, so you can see the night-Michael Harper. In Philip Bryant's latest collection of poems, crystal-clear recollections crack with tangible immediacy: Frost/ is on the grass, but the snow is completely gone. The sky/ is clear and deep blue; I don't know spring is coming/ because I am too young to know what season it is (Eleven Short Scenes from My Life). Philip Bryant is an Associate Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.

"Aunt Janey and Mabel Cook Soul Food"

Aunt Janey
cooks the
gray wrinkles in
a big cast-iron kettle
and tells me
how once one of
her "liberal white friends"
invited her to dinner
and with an aim to please,
cooked "soul food."
She had everything laid
out-greens, okra, ham, and fried chicken-
it was all fine till she brought out the chitterlings.
"I said, 'Mabel, baby, did you make these all by yourself?'
She smiled a proud-as-punch,
cat-ate-the-canary smile
and said, 'Yes, indeed.
Let them thaw, boiled
them like you said you did
with onion.'"
Janey said she looked down at the pot of steaming
hog intestines, started to
fork through it, and pulled
a wad of straw up.
Mabel screamed.
"Did you clean these before
you cooked them?" Janey asked.
Mabel looked puzzled,
"Clean them?"
"Yeah," Janey continued as she
forked up more straw.
"We want to eat the pig,
darling, not
what the pig ate."
"Oh," Mabel said and took
the pot back to the kitchen
chastened and a little embarrassed,
yet undaunted- "Yeah?" I said.
"Yeah," Janey said, "because
then she comes out with a big plate
of pig knuckles.
I asked her right up front,
'Mable, did you
boil and pickle
them feet?'
'Boil and pickle them?' she said."