Summertime! Outdoor dining! Juicy burgers! Vegan hot dogs! Ketchup and mustard everywhere!

Let's face it, we're in the middle of another heat wave, so let us embrace it with some eating of foods in the outdoors.

So, this Poetry Friday, a'cooking we will go with Peter Richardson's "Cloud Puffs above a Ridge-top Barbecue Grill" (from Bit Parts for Fools).

And yes, we've got beer for everyone this time. 

Cloud Puffs above a Ridge-top Barbecue Grill

Since it is not my custom to want less than the small bird
working hard with her curved beak above our cedar deck
to sate an appetite whetted by constant hunting, therefore,

oh, shining dragon that longs to soar over the white pines
in rattling flight, your metallic sides further heating the air,
disembowel a vulture for me, and from one of the conifers

above my triangulated, codified, over-surveyed backyard,
throw its bones onto my land as I toast another June day,
saying to myself: I will live this solstice in the present.

I will break it down into nanoseconds and savour each
as the Merlin hawk savours the goldfinch on a hemlock,
plucking its yellow breast feathers aside before dining.