ALL BREAD
I shared last week in one of the prompts and practices encouraging you to read poetry. Speaking of which, in the next few weeks, I would like to share a few poems that I have reflected on this year, including a brief reflective commentary. As I have done, I would like to invite you to do the same. Nobody reads and interprets the same poem with undifferentiated musings and feelings. Who you are and where you are in life dictates myriads of interpretations. In a way, how you read poems reveals more of who and where you are in life’s journey. As such, I bare what I am processing in the context of my life and reality in these posts.
The first poem I would like to share is a poem by Margaret Atwood titled All Bread. Here it is below.
All Bread by Margaret Atwood
All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens. This dirt
flows through the stems into the grain,
into the arm, nine strokes
of the axe, skin from a tree,
good water which is the first
gift, four hours.
Live burial under a moist cloth,
a silver dish, the row
of white famine bellies
swollen and taut in the oven,
lungfuls of warm breath stopped
in the heat from an old sun.
Good bread has the salt taste
of your hands after nine
strokes of the axe, the salt
taste of your mouth, it smells
of its own small death, of the deaths
before and after.
Lift these ashes
into your mouth, your blood;
to know what you devour
is to consecrate it,
almost. All bread must be broken
so it can be shared. Together
we eat this earth.
I find this poem profoundly spiritual; it captures the unending cycle of life and death (death and life, if you like) which is nature at work, which we are part of. . . Simple staple of food like bread (or rice or corn) arrives at our mouths as a culmination from many deaths. Many had to die in order to nourish us and give us life. There is such beauty of irony and the pinnacle of contradiction (this may be the grandest contradictions of all) here.
I like the notion of “four hours.” Bread making is slow, even if it is produced in mass. I remember a French chef telling me that in America, consumerism drives bread making. In France, bread making is part of its culture. Even as I write this, I am reminded of bringing a warm freshly baked baguette from a local bakery to where we were staying in Paris, years ago. I likened the notion of “four hours” to be a subtle invitation to meditate on how bread comes to us, with deaths and the “first gift,” good water. It is also an invitation to not fast track or speed up the natural process of bread making or if you like, life making. We are who we are because of many deaths before us. We live because “others” died. There simply is no other way, it seems.
There is poignant reminder of “the row of white famine bellies swollen” as we see the bread rising in the oven. As we fill our bellies, we are reminded to those of famine bellies. It is a stark reminder of those who are experiencing dire poverty and under-privileged. Later, the author talks about “All bread must be broken so it can be shared.”
Eating bread is almost an act of holy consecration as we are reminded of many deaths before and after. The last few lines of Mayr Oliver’s poem, Fall Song, echoes the same spiritual truth, “everything lives, shifting from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures.”
“Together, we eat this earth” is a call toward solidarity for all humanity, as well as an invitation to take what is given daily to us with great reverence and humility. Holiness can be accessed and experienced in mundane contexts in everyday life.