Another Poem about Bread

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Monday

As we just attended our 50^th Carleton reunion, I share a poem that one of my former hall mates alerted me to. Mike Hazard, a remarkable photographer and filmmaker from the twin cities read last Sunday’s post about bread poetry and informed me that I omitted one of the best.

It’s by Tom McGrath, who grew up on a North Dakota farm and often focused on working class themes. (You can watch Mike’s documentary on McGrath on Amazon Prime.) In my bread post, I said that Jesus was a poet in the way that he used bread as a key metaphor for his ministry.  Like some of the other poems I mentioned, McGrath takes Jesus’s assertion that he is “the bread of the world” and runs with it.

The poem begins by comparing a kitchen table to “Christmas white plains” and detects the resurrection story in the image of bread rising. As with those other bread poems, McGrath moves between the earthly and the transcendent aspects of bread. For instance, after alluding to the mystery of the risen Lord, McGrath moves on to another mystery which he finds no less profound:

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…

But that, McGrath adds, is a “workaday story”—and because he is writing on a Friday, he wants to emphasize the transcendent weekend dimensions of bread.

Here’s the poem:

The Bread of the World
by Thomas McGrath

On the Christmas white 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.