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Ode to Pizza Pie
I greet my returning family every year with huge homemade pizzas.
They’ve camped for two weeks while I’ve been ‘on retreat’ in our home, alone. By the time they hit the road for the ten-hour journey home, I can’t wait to get them back into my embrace. Such highly charged moments are, for me, the stuff of poetry.
In this case, the thought of people eating mini-pizzas alone in restaurants moved me nearly to tears, against the image of the impending family feast, as I prepared it. It may help you to imagine the three great big, hungry, muscle-flexing sons I serve, with their physical and spiritual need for ‘Man-full’ food.
This ode – read aloud, of course (do try it!) – now precedes that annual feast of ours, and you are welcome to it for yours (at home, large pizzas only, please!)
Ode to Pizza Pie
How pitiful a mini pizza pie.
Its inhumanity could make a grown man cry.
Mere shadow of a great and noble thing:
True Pizza Pie, that heavenly offering.
A pizza should not whisper, “Basta, Basta,”
but rather shout, “Amore!” & “Abondanza!”
And round, full-round, the pizza pie must be
to echo all that vast infinity
of Love, whence comes the abundant life we see
through luscious all-sufficiency.
This culmination of a thousand lives –
the makers, growers, husbanders and wives –
this Substance of the Life that draws us round
and sends us forth supplied for battleground,
this pizza pie, like Bread that sets men free
is source and summit of our artistry.
A dozen small, symbolic pizza pies
don’t equal one True Pie in might, or size.
One crumb of True Pie sings festivity,
and truly feeds small-held community.
The mean and mewling mini is a lie.
And so, for my house, Man-full Pizza Pie!
All the poems are now in one volume, and I’d love for you to have a copy! Click on the cover to buy it, and click here for the recordings of all the poems.
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