Soup Kitchen Blues

Soup Kitchen Blues      
        
She ladles corn dressing like caviar        
but just as good after weeks on the street        
where peanut butter and jelly are filet mignon        
just with a different taste        
On the road to culinary enlightenment        
where ramen noodles        
become the new chicken soup
in the bowl for a Syrian refugee        
with the shadowy eyes of a ghost        
whose spirit is not broken        
by a past which is too real to be a nightmare        
but too dreamlike to haunt every waking hour        
in a land of new fears        
where the cold as Ice agents wait      
like disconsolate ghosts        
from Appomattox    
who starved in the siege of Vicksburg  
with corpses stacked like bread