Hello all! This is Abhra, your bartender tonight. This one is going to be the last poetics I’ll host this year. So I wanted to make this a little special and also a fun prompt, so that we all could enjoy writing for it. Before I tell you what exactly we are going to write about, I need to share some of my own experiences, but I promise, you will have some food for thought.

I was born in a very traditional Bengali household, in eastern part of India – I grew up with my mother’s recipes, loved them – lived them and never actually realized that any other kind of food existed in the world. When I first set out from my home, everyone in friends and family and neighbors asked me a question – how am I going to survive a different food habit? I had no idea what they were talking about at least not until a few days later.

I have traveled around my country since I was sixteen for studies and then work. Initially, it was a very difficult time for me until I realized that to survive I have to make peace with the local food, when I go to some place new. Soon, I was comfortably living on a wide range different food habits and realized how much it varied from one province to other, in my own country. To my surprise, as I met more and more people in different parts of India – I came to know about the differences of their food, how each was unique from the other, even same delicacies had nuances of spices when they were prepared in different corners of same state. What surprised me is how people live for their food. This was the point when I started enjoying the differences.

So the idea is to urge you to write about the uniqueness of your own food/recipes. Do you feel that your food, in some way or other, defines you? I prefer that we write about food habits, but surely we can extend about any other traits that we believe defines us, locally, at least, or even more interestingly, can we use food as metaphor?

Let’s see who are up for the challenge this Tuesday.

Now, if you are new to Dversepoets, this is what you got to do.

• Write a poem and post it to your site/blog.
• Enter a link to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.
• You will find links to other poets. Read and comment on other poet’s work.
• If you are promoting your work on social media, use the tag #dversepoets.

Thank you all. Have fun.

Photo Courtesy : Reetam Banerjee. This was taken at a local fish market.