Loaf
by Miriam Patrick
When she drew her first loaf from the stove
history was in it. Hlaf.
Saxon women labouring at a quern stone,
wind moving over miles of wheatfields,
summer in their ripening.
As the loaf cooled, the world was in it.
Homes with well-spread tables.
Hungry children clamouring at aid trucks.
She queued for rye bread at the Barbakan
with women speaking of lost homelands.
She recalled how all through lockdown
each week just for a sight of him,
she laid a still-warm Challah swathed in tissue
on her son’s doorstep, stood back and waited.
Smiled and left as he knelt down to take it.
As she cut the loaf the miracle of wheat
was in it. She thinks of wild emmer
its thirty thousand years of cultivation,
of her grandmother slicing a small cob thinly.
Realises how close loaf is to love.