The Bread of Life

A Passing Lightness of Being

One morning you open your eyelids, sit up in bed

and in that solitary moment feel lighter, the heavy   

weight you’d been carrying around for six months

lifted off your shoulders, and when you glance

around the dim bedroom, you notice a sack of flour

leaning against the far wall, next to a door leading to

a bright kitchen that has appeared out of memory,

your beloved lost boy at the marble counter

making bread from the flour you’d been lugging

around, kneading the dough as if it’s the aching

muscles in your back, loaf upon loaf slid into the oven,

cooling on racks, carried into a familiar dining room

where everyone you love is seated at a long table,

and behind them, trailing off through infinity mirrors

of lost time, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends

you thought had dropped their napkins on chairs

and wandered off, now sitting there in reflection, each

tearing off a heel of the sweet bread of your sorrow,

holding it up as a blessing you don’t have language

to transcribe, though you know this is no dream,

no delusion, no phony literary device, no fearful lie

told over eons by faithless men in robes and silly hats,

this (this!) is a poem, truth divined, kneaded, baked

by your sweet boy for you to chew on into eternity

                        —SL, May 2024, Port Royal, SC