Dine-Rite
Breakfast Poems
Paperback: 96 pp.
Published: 2009
Have a seat at a table or booth in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Dine-Rite: Breakfast Poems.
Everyone's welcome. As Brodsky puts it, this suburban diner is an "Oasis to the white- and blue-collar and the collarless: / Contractors, carpenters, painters, and plumbers, / Insurance and sales reps, cab drivers, loafers, / Grass-roots politicians, divorce lawyers, retirees, / The entire cast of the human drama, / Under one home-cooking-spoken-here roof."
And overlording this melting pot is its owner, a corpulent, self-anointed Baptist minister, whose unique brand of evangelism permeates Dine-Rite as thoroughly as the greasy, smoky air that wafts from the kitchen.
If you're hungry for poetry that both satisfies and leaves you wanting more, then you've come to the right place. Dig in!
BUY THE BOOK from Time Being Books (the publisher) or Amazon.com.
Dine-Rite: A Cosmos of Its Own
A.m. after a.m., they congregate, at Dine-Rite,
With the regularity of an atomic clock.
A few come with newspapers under their arms,
Most toting thermoses, lunchpails,
An exponentially expanding sect shepherding Bibles
They'll haughtily display next to their plates
And refer to, cursorily, during the following hour or so,
When all participants in this breaking of fast
Will resolve other people's troubles and their own.
This eatery and its counterparts, nationwide,
Are responsible for maintaining America's reputation
As a pressure cooker of cultural diversity,
From which certain elements of the ethnic stew
Are conspicuously missing, not sought out
(Other than to man the kitchen, bus tables, mop the johns):
Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, hippies, homos.
These suburban casual-dining establishments
Have their own honor-among-thieves codes of ethics,
Class stratifications, gerrymandered demographics,
Divine purposes in the infrastructure of the cosmos.
Indeed, each is a cosmos of its own,
A splendid microcosm,
Albeit somewhat skewed, biased, lopsided,
If not insurmountably flawed, in the Maker's conception,
When one considers that no institution,
Certainly no one individual, can be all things to all persons.
Ah, that such a place as Dine-Rite exists
Is reason enough to bequeath,
To each of us who frequents this greasy spoon,
Hope for future enlightenment.
One day, we might even see a new breed of patrons
Ordering chitlins, tamales, sushi, "pot"-pie, K-Y Jelly.
