Duncan Turner
Ode to Bacon Grease, the Key Ingredient of Southern Cuisine
- Does your soul find sweet release
- in meals home-cooked with bacon grease?
- And living now in Northern clime
- do you yet long for food sublime
- prepared with rendered flesh of swine?
- Or having sloughed the South's compulsion
- for salty, smoky pork emulsion
- do you melt Crisco instead
- to lubricate your hoe-cake bread
- and wonder where the tang has fled?
- When in your closing, twilight scene,
- your arteries cholesterol clean
- but life's lamp fading ne'ertheless
- will you yet shun the blessed porcine mess
- in vain pursuit of wholesomeness?
- Take heart, for soon we slip our mortal coil,
- through tunnel toward the light to toil
- and gladly leave behind canola oil,
- to sup again with our wise Creator
- who doubtless saves bacon grease in his refrigerator.
© Duncan Turner, used with permission.
Originally published in: Post to the Host. December, 1996. Prairie Home Companion web site at: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/.
Originally published in: Post to the Host. December, 1996. Prairie Home Companion web site at: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/.
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter, or 