Bread

Richard Levine

(1947- )

This poem reflects on a grandparent’s dutiful approach to work and how that work sustained the family and not just financially. The bread and what it represented is captured in a beautiful line: the bread “leavened the vary air we breathe.”

There is another poem which gets a similar reality Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. It starts, “Sunday’s too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue- black cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in weekday weather make banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.”

Both poems get at that space between waking and purpose. In both poems a job becomes much more than just a job.

Bread

Each night, in a space he’d make

between waking and purpose,

my grandfather donned his one

suit, in our still dark house, and drove

through Brooklyn’s deserted streets

following trolley tracks to the bakery.

There he’d change into white

linen work clothes and cap,

and in the absence of women,

his hands were both loving, well

into dawn and throughout the day—

kneading, rolling out, shaping

each astonishing moment

of yeasty predictability

in that windowless world lit

by slightly swaying naked bulbs,

where the shadows staggered, woozy

with the aromatic warmth of the work.

Then, the suit and drive, again.

At our table, graced by a loaf

that steamed when we sliced it,

softened the butter and leavened

the very air we’d breathe,

he’d count us blessed.