A cookbook can be a quietly radical place to begin a poem. In Ndrek Gjini’s “On Holidays,” the speaker stands in an ordinary kitchen, leafing through pages for instructions on cooking a fish. Before any stove is lit, however, the mind slips sideways: what if a fish were looking up a good recipe on how to cook a man? That single hypothetical turns the domestic scene into a fable about perspective, appetite, and the kind of freedom a holiday allows.
The poem unfolds in two movements. The first is gently comic and intellectual. The speaker is not described as hungry, curious, or ethical; the lines simply record the searching, then the wondering. The reversal is not heavy-handed because the tone remains conversational: “I started to wonder...” and the imagined fish is “looking up / a good recipe / on how to cook a man.” The phrase “good recipe” is especially human and mundane, as if the fish might browse a website or a book with the same fussy care. That ordinariness makes the reversal more unsettling. It does not preach; it just swaps the diner and the dinner.
The second movement turns physical. The speaker leaves the kitchen, and the feet “brought me to the sea” — an image that suggests the body already knows where the imagination wants to go. The verb “splashed” is central. It is not a dive or a swim; it is the unguarded, playful entry of a child on holiday. Once inside “the world of fishes,” the poem makes its most striking claim: “I forgot to eat; I felt no hunger at all.” Hunger does not merely disappear; it is forgotten, left behind in the kitchen with the recipe book. The sea becomes an alternative world where human need is suspended and another creature’s perspective is no longer a joke but a place to inhabit.
Formally, the poem works through short, unrhymed lines and plain language. There is no regular meter, and the line breaks often feel like pauses in thought rather than musical stresses. The short line “on how to cook a man” lands with a little jolt because it arrives after the longer, softer question of the fish “looking up / a good recipe.” The lack of rhyme and decoration mirrors the speaker’s open, undirected holiday mood. The rhythm moves from the enclosed kitchen to the open sea with almost no transition, just the verb “left” and the image of feet knowing the way.
Read as a whole, the poem is significant because it performs a small ethical shift without moralizing. It takes the familiar idea of “putting yourself in someone else’s place” and makes it literal, playful, and sensory. The fish is not sentimentalized; no fish speaks or cries. Instead, the speaker is the one who changes. The recipe book, a symbol of human control over nature, is abandoned. The holiday setting matters: freed from routine, the mind has room to wander into empathy. What begins as a joke about a fish cooking a man ends as a quiet release from appetite, as if seeing from below the water’s surface makes the old hunger irrelevant.
The ending is not a lecture about vegetarianism, though it certainly invites that thought. It is more like a moment of imaginative belonging. To splash into another world is to stop treating it as a menu. The speaker’s hunger vanishes not because a fish has argued back, but because shared perspective has replaced the distance that eating requires. Gjini’s poem is a reminder that a holiday can be more than rest: it can be the temporary unmaking of one’s usual self, a few seconds in which the human recipe is put aside and the world of fishes, briefly, feels like home.