If you must search a house for a place
that reflects the times we live in,
look for dining tables
Take a seat,
this class in verbal origami is about to begin!
We arrive at the dining table
with our hands empty,
and our mouths full of our days,
grinding the parts we can’t talk about between our teeth,
waiting for our turn to spit them out
or gulp them down
before we start eating
A war might be raging outside the door,
peeking in through windows,
but it stays outside
or at least, that’s what we tell each other
while passing salt and pepper around
to build what best suits our taste
until
the war creeps in through a forgotten pin-hole somewhere,
and who can deny
that silent mouths are often as big as gaping pin-holes?
The war spills all over the dining table for a moment
staining every other conversation laid out on it
before someone mops it up hastily
with a napkin woven from
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that”
repeated
a thousand times over
But where would you hide stained laundry in the middle of a dinner?
This napkin
bearing truths we are too fearful of
are folded over
until they fit our clenched fists;
until all stains the war dared spill across
an otherwise ordinary dining table
are buried in the convenient folds
of small talk
Then, don’t we all leave the table
to gather around an age-old television,
or a hand-me-down radio,
or newspapers lying forgotten around the house,
or anything else
that keeps the war imprisoned within its edges
so that we can talk about it
like something that will never invade the house?
Only the stained, crumpled napkin
with the war
and our fears of it
stays back on a dining table
polished with pleasantries,
sturdy enough to hold years
of small talk
but not meant for carrying
uncomfortable, unpleasant, uninvited,
hushed
terrors