These
people, you can't tell them anything.
Why should I repeat what I have said
a dozen times already about baking bread?
Now, since Death walked into City Hall
in his black three piece suit and told the Mayor
that Irving Shiffman's been too much for him,
the people want to see me suddenly.
So
why couldn't they take the plain word
of a baker who had flour on his nose,
who rose at four and put on clean underwear,
so they could buy fresh loaves before breakfast?
Did they need to have this building fall on me?
I should be a hero with a crushed chest,
so they could take my word when I scold them!
They bleat like telephones and race around.
They think that dying is fast as a computer.
But
what's the use, teaching them to live?
Irving Shiffman's tongue is a poor mouse.
I'm a simple man who's learned a baker's patience.
If yeast spores live at all, they find breath slowly.
It's not worth mentioning that I've spent my days
waiting for colonies of living creatures
to awaken and stretch, to divide and divide again.
And the kneading??all that endless pounding
till my muscles can recite their own names.
Kneading makes the dough elastic to catch
the yeast's soul as it rises in the oven.
For
nine days I lay dying in the darkness
beneath the rubble of a modern building.
I counted the fingers on my broken hand.
I thought of wheat and rye, slowly budding.
I rolled words from the Torah like pearl onions.
You want me to tell why I'm still here after
no food, no light, no water, nothing but pain
screaming like a siren for me to die
while they hacked and dug to find our broken bodies?
Irving Shiffman's soul hung back from death
because he'd practiced waiting. My soul sticks
to whistles and redbirds, to plain flour and water.
It hangs onto the world like rising yeast.
