OK--I never make bread. For heaven's sake, we live in a place which, next to France, has the world's greatest bread. Still, I did get very homemakey this week and made a ton of raspberry jam.

Daily Bread


God looked down upon the weary hearts of women
          And gave them bread to knead.
He looked down
          through all those countless centuries
                    at the cumulative weight of their silent hours--
                             the unspoken grief
                             the loves lost, the loves betrayed
                             the wrenching worry
                             all their varied hungers--
          and made a gift to women's hands.

The small essential ritual
          of setting the daily bread to rise.

A spongy, sticky voiceless mass
          to be twisted and wrung like their fleshy hearts,
To be folded and shaped
          and patted down with little daily joys
          to be pressed with a hundred kinds of cares
          and punched and pulled
                    with all the grudging bitternesses.
To absorb the blessings and irritations
                              of each blessed or vexing day.

It's the simplest and earthiest of tasks
To pump from the beating heart
Through callused fingers and hard palms
                    all that wonder
                    all that woe
          into a lumpy, yeasty thing--
                              a thing that can't be bruised.

And the power of all those unspoken things
          set rising in the dough.
And then baked and broken
                    and spread with honey or with jam,
Becoming,
          magically,
                    a gift of another kind.