John Sibley Williams

Michelle Boisseau Contest Finalist

At This Table We Sing with Joy, with Sorrow

                          – for Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota Sioux chef and cookbook author

If not for the body, let’s rafter this old table up

like once-believe-in hymns simply for the sake of it.

Let’s brush the dust of dead stars from the lacy cloth. 

Scrape our plates free of what our grandparents failed

to finish & our children, hopefully, will never learn

to swallow. Every night it seems the worst of us

takes over & again the table sinks out of reach.

The glass always half-empty, and we empty it.

All this amaranth scattered across the floor so we can hear

our ghosts when they enter, & when they leave us. So much

unwilded rice & unprepared longing. How we cannot stop 

mending what is not yet broken & killing to prove the world

still needs us. There are still so many unlit fires in our ovens,

sometimes I forget there’s meant to be a difference between us 

& them, between an unpainted & a burning cross. My daughters

carry my name like a cross over their tender little shoulders.

I no longer know what to say when asked for the truth. 

Whose truth will keep the sorrow from their song?

Someone handcrafted this unvarnished oak so we might

one day take stock of one another. Let’s prop our history up

on piles of unread books, so nothing wobbles, so the legs

grow equally tall, so even that uncle they say struggled

to hurt others the way he would never be hurt can join us, 

all the ugliness intact, & his wife who conformed to her container

like goat milk. Let’s sit, please, at this table between my own mixed-

race daughters & the hate you’d have had for them. Here’s some crushed

berries for your toast. A dull knife to spread it. Outside nothing has changed

of the American sycamore apart from what we’ve chosen to hang from it.