On the Christmaswhite plains of the floured and flowering kitchen table The holy loaves of the bread are slowly being born: Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light -- Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching backs. It must be Friday, the bread tells us as it climbs Out of itself like a poor man climbing up on a cross Toward transfiguration. And it is a Mystery, surely, If we think that this bread rises only out of the enigma That leavens the Apocalypse of yeast, or ascends on the beards and beads Of a rosary and priesthood of barley those Friday heavens Lofting . . . But we who will eat the bread when we come in Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery That brings the bread to rise: it is the love and faith Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives Of those around them . . . just as we know it is hunger -- Our own and others' -- that gives all salt and savor to bread. But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...LULLABY by CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW by JOHN DONNE ODES I, 9. TO WINTER by QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS A SESTINA, IN IMITAION OF SIG. FRA. PETRARCA by PHILIP AYRES FOR NOEL (WHERE A GATE SWINGS EITHER WAY) by BEULAH ALLYNE BELL A PRAYER by WARREN K. BILLINGS |