Carole Coates

Feast Day

This is your meal – formal as the levee
of a royal personage, some pale Infanta
decked out for Corpus Christi.

For how but in custom or in ceremony
could you expose your body
to this extreme event?

Try a pale kidney, naked from the grill
or the small moist heart of a lamb chop
or the white breast of a tiny bird?

You've renounced the treason of vegetables
since butter, like a dagger,
was concealed in the dish.

Once you sliced the globe of an egg
and its yellow eye stared at you.
You're like a funeral or a coronation.

Perform your stately and exiguous feeding.
People might even pay to watch you eat –
some would give anything to see it.

This poem first appeared in Smiths Knoll 38, 2006
and in Looking Good, Shoestring Press, 2009

© 2006 Carole Coates

The poems on these pages are the intellectual property of the author and may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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Last updated 20 June 2016