The Breadmaker’s Time
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.