poem10 Jan 2021 07:02 pm
Deborah L. Davitt
I never thought of bread as a living thing, but it is, a colony of yeast bacteria given living space and food in a matrix of earth-given grain, sea-born salt, and sky-born water; they exhale their own breath to make their city rise, and we freeze them in place with fiery oven heat.  Little wonder then, that the Romans brought bread and wine for libation to the graves of their ancestors, and sent the living food down feeding tubes to the bones and ashes to appease the hungry ghosts;  little wonder, too, that on Dia de la Muerte, people for whom that language hangs richly on their tongues set out living bread for the dead, marked with bones, or Chimalma’s tears.  Maybe the ghosts can sniff out the life in it, the bacteria still struggling to survive their own cremation, entombed in the rigid shape of their own mobile grave; maybe they have to respect the struggle to endure, so like their own; maybe, like the living, they just like the smell of hot, buttered bread, fresh from the oven, and cling to the heels as we bring the last pieces to our churning mouths.  Maybe they slide lusciously down into our gullets, ingested with the bread and perhaps the wine that we pour into glasses instead of on the grass; maybe they become a part of us, and leave the graveside nestled in our hearts and bowels, instead of lingering to stare at futile plastic roses left to fade in the sun.
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[…] poem, spec, “Feeding the Dead,” Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts, January 10, 2021, http://www.polutexni.com/?p=10747 […]
[…] “Feeding the Dead†• Deborah L. Davitt • Polu Texni, January 10 […]