The Sunday Poem: “Not Shelling Fava Beans With Alice Waters” by John Briscoe

January 7th, 2024

The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.

John Briscoe reads his poem at its conclusion.

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Roger Wollstadt, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

San Francisco, 1959

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Not Shelling Fava Beans With Alice Waters
...“Shelling fava beans is one of the most meaningful experiences.”
………………– Alice Waters, [New York Times, May 17, 2021]

I jammed
with the Afro-American Jazz Band
in the old Off Plaza on McAllister,
and with the blind Black pianist whose name I can’t remember
in the club we knew as The Question Mark
whose sign on Haight Street was just a neon ?,
when the club was straight and featured jazz
all while the rest of the world took in
especially in those years of the Nineteen Sixties,
especially in those years in San Francisco,
the high tsunami of rock.
But I never jammed with Bird, with Miles, or Monk.

I played pick-up basketball on the Panhandle courts
and on the North Beach and Grattan playgrounds
with many of the good ones, most forgotten,
though never with Meschery or Lacour,
nor with Bill Russell or K. C. Jones.
Later I’d have lunch with Joe Alioto
to listen to his stories of San Francisco,
to his literary reveries, his poems
but I never saw or spoke with Ina Coolbrith,
whose birth name was Josephine Smith nor with
her namesake Josephine Miles, or Kenneth Rexroth,
Martin Luther King or his mentor Howard Thurman.
And my kids had a soccer game apiece
the day Doris Muscatine invited me
to shell fava beans with Alice Waters.

Listen to John Briscoe read his poem

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John Briscoe is a San Francisco poet, author and lawyer. He has published four books of poetry, and five of prose. He’s received the Oscar Lewis Award in Western History, first Prize in the Top Shelf Book awards, and other literary distinctions. His law practice for more than fifty years has included representing countries in disputes with other countries in international courts, and advising the United Nations in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He serves on the boards of several literary organizations, and is a distinguished fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Listen to the 1961 performance of Miles Davis playing Johnny Mercer and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “I Thought About You,” recorded live at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, with Hank Mobley (saxophone); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); and Jimmy Cobb (drums). [Columbia/Legacy]