We filled the empty bowl at the community celebration,
we filled it as the formal act of restoration
of what the famine took from the household and the nation,
we filled it with the harvest and with the occasion.
The empty bowl was carried to the center of the circle,
the elder filled it from the common grain, the specific
ritual of the refilling that the village had designed
for the year after the famine, for the reclaimed and the refined.
Every household brought a portion to the central bowl,
which is the redistribution of the abundance as a whole
symbol of the community’s recovery together,
which is the difference between surviving and the whether.
The children who were born in the crisis year were given
the first serving from the bowl, which is the driven
logic of the ritual: the ones who started in the hunger
should be the first to eat the year of the longer.
I ate from the common bowl that evening and I thought
of what the year before had been, the specific what
it meant to carry an empty bowl to a line,
and what it meant to carry it here to refill in design.
Both are the same bowl held the same way in the same hands,
which is the specific truth that ritual understands,
the continuity of the object through the before and after,
the bowl that held the lack and now the laughter.