Back to Issue Fifteen

"You Shall Eat and Be Satisfied" by David Ebenbach

You Shall Eat and Be Satisfied

       —Deuteronomy 8:10

And you shall be blessed at your table and in your chair

and blessed in the eyes of the cook who laid the table

and the carpenter who built the chair

and in the leaning forward and the leaning back

and you shall also be blessed in the nighttime when you wake

with indigestion, and you shall be blessed again in the hungry morning

when you stand over the sink with leftovers in your hand

blessed you shall be in the doctor’s office, in the blood tests

and in the blood pressure cuff, blessed in the chastising eyes of the doctor

and you shall be blessed in the bathroom mirror

and in the comparisons you shall make to the photographs of magazines

in the magazine stand that stands in the world

and blessed on the treadmill and the elliptical

and in your ready sweat and aging unfamiliar body, you shall be blessed

blessed in the unkind mirror blessed in your unkind eyes

but you shall be blessed, yes, in the eyes of the cook who laid the table

and the farmer who laid the field, the laborer who laid the conveyor belt

and you shall be blessed by your own curling belt

blessed by the ever-harder work of the belt and the blood

struggling to bless us in the morning and in the night

and most of all you shall be blessed by your tongue,

that simplest of blessers, the one who leaps with praise

at every syllable of good food, you shall be blessed by that simple praise

and you shall inevitably be blessed by the one who laid your body

into your body, which has an end that is always coming,

whether you have been blessed or whether you have not,

and you will be blessed if you bless the food, if you bless the body

if you eat and are satisfied and if you eat again and are satisfied again

if you know above all that blessing is both reward and injury, and

if you know that these blessings are all that there is to receive,

you shall surely be blessed