Читать книгу A Hundred Silences - Gabeba Baderoon - Страница 9

6. Devil’ s food

Devil’ s food

to Mai

Pay attention to where you walk

– the filtered light through trees,

the kind of moss underfoot,

the roots of trees, moist and quiet,

where the caps of mushrooms crowd.

Learn which mushrooms are perfect, poisonous,

and which, misshapen, brown, are best of all.

Test the give of the flesh

– too soft means they are bitter and useless for eating.

What’s not for eating haunts them all.

Devil’s food, says my aunt.

Use your hands.

Feel for the spiky underside of the head

and the soft stem, thinner than your finger.

Probe for the base, push aside

the giving moss, reach

right down, learn by touch alone

when to pull, when it will yield

and come up whole.

Brush off dirt.

Do not eat

until they are cooked.

They taste of the soft metals of the earth,

themselves, not themselves,

the presence of older things.