ICI Macarons & Cafe is a Philadelphia icon that Julia and I stumbled upon in March of 2016 during a college visit to the east coast. I stumbled on prints–not footprints but stacks of photograph– this morning as Tim helped me find images that might spark today’s poem. I had forgotten completely about this moment and this place, but the photograph brought it back, down to the very taste of the mint macaron and the creamy punch of the cafe latte.

Just this morning, I discovered that this splendid place, ICI, is an immigrant success story–aren’t we all?

If you scroll down, you’ll see a delivery vehicle for another culinary success story in Philadephia, A Peace of Pizza, who offer delicious fare AND a way to pay it forward by feeding homeless people. (Click on the link to see the NPR story on them.) Philadelphia is one of our oldest cities, and it is still alive with our founding values.

I also reflected that as exciting and educational as travel is for me, its most reliable effect is the way it gives me a fresh sense of the value of home–the essential need to be ‘at home’ wherever you are. (Or, as I first read on a Mary Englebreit card, “Wherever you go, there you are.”)

Below are a few of my favorite images from that trip ten years ago to Philadelphia, a city so important to our national identity, our identification with personal liberty and collective “liberty and justice for all,” the pledge we all learned in kindergarten.

All these images and insights–infused for me with memory and whimsy–merged into the poem for today, “ICI.”

LESLIE

(I suspect the images from this trip might spark another poem this month–stay tuned!)