Bread by Penelope Shuttle

In this poem "bread" is the slang for "money". As food, the doughy stuff has long been considered "the staff of life" although, as the Bible warns more than once, "Man doth not live by bread alone." In the Lord's Prayer, "our daily bread" represents spiritual as much as physical nourishment, and this week's poem, "Bread", is concerned with the equally essential and intangible "nightly bread" of poetry.

Bread

I work hard for my nightly breadeven though I'm only a poet

I work hard at listeningto what my left hand whispers to my right,and at folding swans back into ice

I work hard, praying for the staminaof Chagall's favourite mistressor the happiness of a womanmarried to a man without a foreskin

Hard I work,scrubbing doorsteps and stairwaysmade of words

I eat my bread dry

I reach down, pluck my grandfatherfrom the blackout air-raid streetsof 1941 London,removing this Superintendent of a Work Gangrepairing the city's fractured water supplyfrom danger

I can do this,although I am only a poet