The Baker

He measures the grain, dusty and dry,

With the hand of a surgeon, with a carpenter’s eye.

Salt now for flavor, 

Now yeast for the rising,

With temperate water gently baptizing.

Fondly He kneads His obdurate clay;

Its defiance with tender embrace He repays.

Enfolding again, 

Again setting free,

In time with His creation’s immoderacy.

At last lies the dough, supple and smooth,

Pondering its singular encounter with truth.

To swell full with wonder,

Or shrink from its light?

To mount slowly skyward, or sink inward with spite?

In darkness and flame, the furnace awaits;

Time presses all to its inscrutable gates.

Yet, through its terror,

Goes the Baker before,

Remolding death into life’s corridor. 

Submitting His Passion, the hell of each scourge, 

 To the once formless loaf He draws from the forge, 

The Baker resigns,

His own glory denies,

He is unleavened that His beloved might rise.

Flavorsome or flat, the crust and the crumb

Of every fresh loaf to judgment must come.

Still, in His love,

The Baker tastes not the bread

Until it has with His own Body been fed.

© Elise Matich, 2012

“Just Lyricz” Live at Random Row This Thursday, February 16

If you’re free Thursday evening, why not get out and support the most exciting genuine multicultural culture event happening in Charlottesville?!  In addition to its open mic (hip hop, folk music, poetry, who knows?), Just Lyricz will feature a guest poet this week.  He'll provide an extended performance (likely about 30 minutes).  His name is Matthew Cuban Hernandez, and he's from Jacksonville, Florida.  He is a slam poet who has competed nationally and coaches youth who also perform poetry.  Check out this You Tube video for a sample of one of his poems:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA-Q5yS84h8&feature=related.

The details:  Thursday, February 16th from 7pm until 10pm at Random Row bookstore, 315 W. Main St., Charlottesville.  $5 entrance fee.  Just tell Camisha or Anthony (the DJ) if you would like to get on stage to read/recite some of your work.

Bears

This one I’ve never heard

but I remember the old mountain story

about the woman who is tricked

and hands her baby over the fence

to a bear, who she thinks is her husband…

and I have dreams about bears

they change into people and change back

I change into a bear and change back

I sit in a tree and sing to one

until fierceness turns docile

like a puppy

and, god, I miss those mountains

It’s a pain in my throat and the only place

that causes me to cry when I see it and when I don’t.

So we’re all kin and we’ve all married

our kin and we continue to find them,

we continue to look for their twinkling eyes

in the hills of every place.

One may come lumbering out of a cave

give itself shape apart from the trees

and look like me and feel like me

and like the polar bear be the loneliest

--that’s because he hasn’t got any mountains.

Why do I miss it? The thing I’ve never had?

It was a distant backdrop to my childhood dramas

but a visit is a visitation

the place where mist is at dawn

where I fished on the Shenandoah

where morning glories dot even the sun.

Stories of bears reside in my flesh

what is commonplace there

becomes extraordinary elsewhere.

Aunt Han Ran may have used a broom

to chase that bear off her back porch,

I’ll invite him in to sit by the fire

dust the snow from his fur

and ask for all the things he knows.

I’ll bid him stay till spring

he may tell me where the treasure is hid

or what enchantment he is in.

I am close in nature and nature

is close inside me. Woods and Mountains

become my house and call me.

If I don’t have you covering me

I dream of bears and an ancient wooden door

and my Daddy calls to tell me mountain lore.

© Linda Suddarth, 2001

"Bears" was published in Alchemy on Sunday, Lit. journal. 

pub. through Pacifica Grad.Institute, 2001

"Mosquito and Mishka"
from Wikimedia Commons

Language of Light

The river doesn’t stop

on a humid afternoon — but I do.

Water and air are mingled, and

all the sounds I hear —

human, animal, elemental —

are thick with the substance of life

on this water planet.

It makes me glad —

this is much more than I had a moment ago,

driving down the road.

I hope that I shall always have

a river to stop beside,

to remind, more than the sea, that

I am on a journey into me,

that I do not and cannot belong to any creed,

that I’m a witness and a consort of truth —

so how can I believe?

Sundown low spills gold into the stream.

I just relax and get quiet, 

knowing what it means —

water is speaking in the language of light,

and if I listen just right

I get the proof —

I cannot hear

anything but truth.

I cannot hear anything

but truth.

I cannot hear anything but truth!

© Gerry Sackett, 2012

A river to stop beside; photo by Tony Russell