While onions and garlic are sautéing,
and I am drawing fresh, filtered water,
a woman is walking many meters
to dip a bucket into a well
at a refugee camp in Uganda.
While slicing organic carrots and celery
carried home from the farmer’s market,
a four-year old boy and his six-year old sister
are sorting food scraps
in a garbage heap in Managua.
In goes clean barley, scooped from the grocer’s barrel,
while a man in Myanmar, a woman in Somalia,
are stirring a kettle above an open fire,
rice gleaned from their village’s diminishing crop,
by cyclone or drought, by soldiers torching fields.
Into my garden for chard, spinach, basil,
green and fresh, planted by my own hands,
while the child in Sierra Leone whose
hands were severed during civil war,
now a young man, begs in the streets.
With each ingredient, I become smaller.
The pot simmers, I stir, taste, season.
A roadside bomb kills an American soldier
and two Iraqis, the streets of Tijuana
splatter with blood. A woman in Congo,
left to bear her rapist’s child.
– Sylvia Levinson
