Bread for the Multitude

(Bare Hills - found here)

And one, from hunger and bitterness,

Wrung the loaf as if it had absorbed

All the promises he had believed.

But between hands it re-gathered itself,

The way a cloud gathers itself from within,

And they didn’t see that it stayed

About the same size. He listened.

His lips sweetened. Then he slept.

When he awoke,

The ground was dusted with crumbs

Like a snow had drifted across

To cool the afternoon, and his dreams.

It lay on the backs of his hands,

The smell mixed with the grass, and there were

No flowering trees to scatter petals

And remind him of the season,

The river was too far away to whisper.

There was only the hill rubbed bare in places

From so many bodies. A lifting

Breeze. And the miraculous summer

Snow he would tell strangers about,

A brightness to last a lifetime.

~Jack Stewart