The Breadmaker’s Time

Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe

 

 

The breadmaker bids for time:

she steals

yeast seconds; kneading minutes; baking hours; rising days.

 

Sandy yeast granules,

feeding on sweetness,

discover life through water

warmed by the day’s heat.

Birth and life are instant.

 

White flour flies into the air, seeps defiantly

through the hands of the 3 O’clock afternoon

into the breadmaker’s hourglass,

and begins its descent.

This is her time.

 

Frothing liquid yeast, wheaten powder, are

rolled into dough:

a live flesh that grows pliant, satiated,

each time

the hands dig into its body.

Delve twist turn and rise

Delve twist turn and rise

Again

Again

 

Her hourglass listens to the sound of

a human working,

the body, breathing, softly breathless, offering itself to its

crafting hands.

The sand stops flowing.

This is the breadmaker’s time,

the poet’s time, the lovers’ time,

when nothing moves

into the past or the future.

Only hands  

Delve twist turn and rise

Delve twist turn and rise

Again

Again


 

Then

arms hot,

fingers pungent,

knuckles throbbing white,

are wrenched out and

the breadmaker returns to their time.

To rise one hour,

to bake, seared in two hundred degrees,

for 30 minutes

to rest, cooling on wire racks,

for ten,

to go back to conversations, obligations,

for a lifetime’s duration.

 

She carries the loaf; steaming, crusted;

to the family.

Steps into the dining room.

 

Serrated steel cuts through

and a hand

lifts butter onto silver, spreads it, melting, on the breathing surface in one stroke.

Someone suggests: “it should have stayed a bit longer in the oven.”

 

She sees the sand plunge, emptying

the upper dome in one fall.

The breadmaker’s time vanishes like

            the slices on the table.

        


Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe is a writer from Sri Lanka. Her poetry  won the State Youth Award in 1993, the English Writers' Cooperative Prize for Poetry in 1998, and her manuscripts were short listed for the Gratiaen Prizes of 1998 and of 2008, the literary prize established by Michael  Ondaatje for creative writing in English in Sri Lanka. She has published  works of non-fiction, Rhythm of the Sea and Trinity, and her poetry has been  published by Channels, The Poetry Journal, and The Osprey Journal.  Jirasinghe read Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London, and works for the US-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission, in Colombo.

 

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