"All Together." By Echo Drift

“All Together” is a lyrical meditation on food, fellowship, and the fragile threads that connect us as a community, as a country. With a warm, conversational tone, Echo Drift and lyricist Samuel E Burns deliver a poignant, unpretentious piece that feels like sitting down to a backyard barbecue with someone who sees the world differently, but still offers you a plate.

At first glance, the poem is a celebration of barbecue—its rituals, flavors, and fierce regional loyalties. Burns uses sensory imagery ("meat that falls apart, / Juices dripping from my elbow") to immerse us in the culinary experience, grounding abstract ideas in visceral, mouthwatering detail. But beneath the smoked meats and tangy sauce debates lies something deeper: a yearning for unity in a divided landscape.

What makes “All Together” especially resonant is its subtle pivot from food to philosophy. The act of eating becomes a metaphor for listening, for empathy, for shared experience. “Let’s not talk politics, let’s talk of life,” the speaker urges—not out of avoidance, but out of a desire to find common ground first. In the classroom of America, the lesson isn’t consensus, but coexistence.

There’s no pretense or grandiosity here. The message is simple and sincere: we may differ in belief, background, or barbecue sauce, but we can still sit at the same table. Food becomes both literal nourishment and a symbolic bridge.

“All Together” doesn’t resolve our divisions—but it offers an invitation. To eat. To listen. To pass the plate.