Sonnet: Everyday Is Prince Spaghetti Day
by John Kendall Hawkins
.
to the Brothers of La Salette
.
I lived in Lowell long after Jack hit the road,
but he must have taken the textile mills with him
and the brown canals and old cobblestones. Tom Joad
would have found a home here, and a job with the grim
immigrants from French Canada, trading long yarns
about bourgeois buffer zones and cold Dust Bowl nights,
filled with hunger and emptiness, horse fire barns
that scream of misery and human plights.
I used to speed down Chelmsford Street hill on my bike
unable to stop in time for the lights, crossing
myself afterward, passing the factories like
an escaped angel on horseback, wild and tossing.
Can still remember the first time I read The Prince
Grotto menu: Veal, wine, and wise talk ever since.
* Adjacent to the Prince Spaghetti factory in Lowell was the Prince Grotto restaurant that started as an executive retreat and expanded into an upscale restaurant specializing in Italian cuisine. It was a favorite haunt of one of the brothers of La Salette Seminary in Ipswich, where I attended summer camp and watched the moon landing in 1969. The haunted brothers brought me along to the restaurant.
