Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BREAD OF THIS WORLD; PRAISES III, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BREAD OF THIS WORLD; PRAISES III, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: On the christmaswhite plains of the floured and flowering
Last Line: But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week
Subject(s): Labor & Laborers; Men; Work; Workers


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




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