Rose Maria Woodson

Saganaki

I have a taste for saganaki.
The gauze of memory blows
in my mind’s window, a lovely
curtain of long ago. My family
takes me out for my birthday. Gift-
wrapped in love, we ribbon
into a Greek restaurant. 
Somewhere on Halsted.
The room is a booming
balloon, popping with Opas & fire.
We start with saganaki. We are
laughing transcendence.

It amazes me.
How we fill & empty.
Moons in our private skies.
Sometimes in the net of morning
silence, we find ourselves
caught in past light,
stained glass windows waiting
for a green light.

Today, 
Chicagohenge,
the sun stubbornly threads rays
through a bricks-and-mortar needle downtown, 
dancing bold as an old uncle still glad
to be alive,
like memory threading through a pause, 
making me crave something
that has nothing
to do with hunger.