~Bread Offerings ~ Week of April 16, 2018

Greetings grain lovers, Today, I have very few words. It’s still raining like hell and there are cherries bursting into place. So it goes. Here’s a poem.   Every Day You Play by Pablo Neruda Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water, You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands. You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of … Read more

Bread & Poetry ~February 13, 2017~

Hello, Loves— One of the perks of being a grain geek is that when people travel, they often bring me grains from around the world. A friend had the good fortune of covering the Slow Food Terra Madre in Italy as a journalist this year and she returned home with a bag of polenta. I simmered it long and slow for several hours in whey and it makes for a fragrant, floral addition to my mama bread. This week, in place of a poem I’m sharing an essay that speaks to what is happening in the world today. It … Read more

Bread & Poetry~ week of September 19th to September 25th

Mistaken Identity by Tony Hoagland I thought I saw my mother in the lesbian bar with a salt gray crew cut, a nose stud and a tattoo of a parrot on her arm. She was sitting at a corner table, leaning forward to ignite, on someone’s match, one of those low-tar things she used to smoke, and she looked happy to be alive again after her long marriage to other people’s needs, her twenty-year stint as Sisyphus, struggling to push a blue Ford station wagon full of screaming kids up a mountainside of groceries. My friend Debra had brought … Read more

Bread & Poetry~ week of September 12th to September 18th

Button by Jane Hirshfield It likes both to enter and to leave, actions it seems to feel as a kind of hide-and-seek. It knows nothing of what the cloth believes of its magus-like powers. If fastening and unfastening are its nature, it doesn’t care about its nature. It likes the caress of two fingers against its slightly thickened edges. It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body. The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure. Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread, its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun, calico and round. … Read more

Bread & Poetry~ Week of September 5th to 11th

The Tree by Ezra Pound I stood still and was a tree amid the wood, Knowing the truth of things unseen before; Of Daphne and the laurel bow And that god-feasting couple old that grew elm-oak amid the wold. ‘Twas not until the gods had been Kindly entreated, and been brought within Unto the hearth of their heart’s home That they might do this wonder thing; Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before.     Seeded Spelt Mama Bread Spelt is an ancient … Read more