My Sandwich
So many things
you’d not have thought of
until they were given.
Even the simple-
a cottage cheese sandwich,
a heron’s contractable neck.
You eat. You look.
Then you look back and it’s over.
This life. This flood-
unbargained for as lasting love was-
of lasting oddness.
Notes
Where Mary Oliver’s Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957 found quiet communion in the patient, sunlit labor of gathering wild fruit from the scrub, Jane Hirshfield’s My Sandwich centers on the sudden, unbargained-for gift of an ordinary cottage cheese lunch paired with the strange grace of a passing heron. The swift glide from chewing to looking to realizing it is already over reveals how conscious awareness constantly lags behind the slip of time, demonstrating that life’s surplus cannot be planned or hoarded, but arrives unbidden as a continuous flood of odd and fragile gifts. It grounds August’s theme of Feast in the bittersweet wonder of modest, fleeting domestic sufficiency, reminding us that the season’s richest banquet lies in marveling at the simple meal in our hands before the hour quietly disappears. #poetry #janehirshfield #feast #august #sandwich