The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
"Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo, from Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird. © W. W. Norton and Co., 1998.Image credit: This oil painting has two online attributions. The first is "Prayer before Meal," by Vicente Manansala (originally color). The other is "Family Prayer," by Fay Ocampo. If you have definitive knowledge about the artist, please leave a comment.
I don't know if I have solved the artist mystery or not but doing a Google Lens reverse image search brought up Vicente Manansala's name and not Fay Ocampo. I then searched on his name and found an article by someone who said his works are often copied.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.troopertravels.net/vicente-manansala/. He was named a national artist by the Philippine government after he died. Plenty of images of other works by him in this style, Transparent Cubism, that strongly resemble this. The last image in another article on him bears a resemblance to the one here https://bluprint.onemega.com/the-genre-works-of-national-artist-vicente-manansala/. A final small bit of evidence from a piece of ephmera: someone was sent a postcard from the Philippines with this image on it stating it was by him http://ingajanzen.blogspot.com/2012/11/transparent-cubism.html?m=1.