Pancake Tuesday

Normally a Saturday ritual, it seemed
we should mark this day with pancakes too,
a breakfast-table recollection 
of how feasting and fasting so often cohere. 
Even, I thought as I mixed egg and milk 
the night before, even mark the way 
that air fills the batter like 
pockets of life, as these very 
ordinary, meager elements of that life - 
egg, milk, flour - are mingled 
and Spartan fare turns to luxury. 


Yet how to explain to those for whom 
life's a constant grazing table that 
sometimes, though luxury's just 
a whisking bowl away from our grasp, 
it might be meet to go without, 
to join the cousin in the wilderness 
with camel's hair and the desert's lean pantry, 
to turn our hearts to the sight of Life. 


And how to explain to my own heart, 
so accustomed to gorging and hairshirts alike, 
that all is gift, when the breakfast ends and 
the drive to work begins, 
when Adam's curse taints feast, and fast 
is sometimes only a puff of air? 
How to tell the shriven soul 
to take the fast and the feast in turn, 
to sit at table and taste this grace 
as death is at work, yet life is too, 
as life is at work in you.