Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In a couple of weeks, I will drive with my family to Rochester, Vermont. Since moving to Nashville, it’s become the most highly anticipated trip of the year. Two routes grant us equal delights but this year we decided on the northern passage: Kentucky, Ohio, and New York, then on to Vermont.

But first, the listening experience: 80s pop and 90s hip-hop, an audio book, Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, punctuated by our favorite podcasts and some old-timey radio shows. We stay in a gorgeously renovated Airbnb in the German Village neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. We eat Bavarian food, then shop at The Book Loft, arguably one of the best bookstores in the country. Next, we make our way to Rochester, New York, where we lodge at a historic hotel. In the morning we eat sweet pastries and coffee before taking in contemporary art at RoCo.

But, of course, the biggest joy of the journey is that moment when we cross on Route 4 into Vermont in the middle of summer. The visual noise of billboards easefully give way to radiant mountains, pastures, and farmland seemingly from another era. Quaint villages with general stores that we cannot simply pass by beckon us.

I used to only associate the Green Mountain State with freezing temperatures and blizzards. But recent summers have revised my perspective. People seem nicer between June through September; jumping into a swimming hole is much preferred than the penguin plunge in Lake Champlain; a microbrew is best enjoyed after a trail hike to a mountain peak. So much of this time of year is one big, lush offering.

Today’s remarkable poem exalts in the cultural rite of eating a meal prepared by an elder. Its sumptuous language and lush syntax are markers of the summer’s abundance.

A Blessing
by Samyak Shertok

after Li-Young Lee

Twice a year Apa cooked his “monk’s half-moon” dish: 
pumpkin blossom lamb curry—first crackle the fenugreek seeds 
in ghee, stir the thinly sliced baby pumpkins translucent, 
add a concocted paste of wild herbs soaked in buttermilk overnight, 
drop the smoked fatted lamb pieces, pour bone stock, let 
the fat melt, then spread the flowers whole on the top 
until they’re dreaming—but before offering it to us over steamed rice, 
even before his gods, he’d serve those who were not home, 
place the filled clay bowls on the edge of the smoldering hearth 
in a half-ring, always bigger portions than for those politely waiting 
around him with clean wet hands, which made me wish 
I were not there but forgot all about it as bite after bite 
dissolved in my mouth, each mouthful lusher than the last, 
more ravenous for the next: cliff-forged flesh, aged smoke, 
foraged fragrance, rain-honeyed dark, earthed moonmilk, 
petrichor pistils, salt, butter gossip of the butterflies, fire 
of the fireflies, summer, sweet summer, sweet impossible summer—

"A Blessing" by Samyak Shertok. Originally published in Poetry. Used by permission of the poet.