by Stanley Burnshaw
This that I give you now,
This bread that your mouth receives,
Never knows that its essence
Slept in the hanging leaves
Of a waving wheatfield thriving
With the sun’s light, soil, and the rain,
A season ago, before knives
And wheels took life from grain
That leaf might be flour — and the flour
Bread for the breathers’ need …
Nor cared that some night one breather
Might watch how each remnant seed
Invades the blood, to become
Your tissue of flesh, and molests
Your body’s secrets, swift-changing
To arms and mounds of your breasts,
To thigh, hand, hair, to voices,
Your heart and your woman’s mind …
For whatever the bread, do not grieve now
That soon a flash of the wind
May hurry away what remains
Of this quiet valiance of grass:
It entered your body, it fed you
So that you too can pass
From valiance to quiet, from thriving
To silenced flesh, and to ground:
Such is our meager cycle
That turns but a single round
For the deathless flesh of the earth,
For the signless husks of men dead,
For the folded oceans and mountains,
For birds, and fields, and for bread.
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