New Food Blessing

We had friends over last night for dinner, which we enjoyed very much. I was happy to read a newly found food blessing before we ate, one I found in the poet Mary Oliver's book The Swan. Here it is:

Beans Green and Yellow

In fall

it is mushrooms

gathered from dampness

under the pines;

in spring

I have known 

the taste of the lamb

full of milk

and spring grass;

today

it is beans green and yellow

and lettuce and basil

from my friends' garden–

how calmly,

as though it were an ordinary thing,

we eat the blessed earth. 

I added the italics to the last 3 lines. I don't know how Mary Oliver would feel about that. 

I will add this poem to my collection of beautiful quotations about soil, earth, dirt. As spring really swings into full gear, I hope you take time to smell the earth as it is warming up and gearing up to give us life again in so many forms. 

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD