Here is my little contribution for the "Blogger's Silent Poetry Reading in honor of St. Brigid." This is the fifth annual one (if what I read is right). I like these kinds of things; they give me a sense of connection to something larger, and also a sense of doing something simple but hopefully enriching to others.


The poem for this year is much simpler than some in the past:

Be gentle when you touch bread
Let it not lie uncared for--unwanted
So often bread is taken for granted
There is so much beauty in bread
Beauty of sun and soil, beauty of honest toil
Winds and rain have caressed it,
Christ often blessed it
Be gentle when you touch bread.

This is from the "More with Less" cookbook (one of my favorite cookbooks and one I keep returning to; it is published by the Mennonite Church). They attribute the poem to "anonymous." I have a bread warmer (a piece of unglazed earthenware that you can heat up to put in the bottom of a basket to keep bread warm) with a different version of this on it, it says it is "An Irish Blessing for Bread."

However, I've also seen it attributed to David Adam. So, like a lot of these simple poems - some used as pre-meal blessings or "graces," it seems that they may not clearly belong to anybody - and maybe that means they belong to everybody.

I like the poem for several reasons. First off, it celebrates a simple thing - a thing so many of us take for granted. Not many of us have lived in such a way where we HAD to make our own bread to eat, rather than making it as a "luxury" - as a way of expressing ourselves or using fancy ingredients or something. I suspect our feelings about things like bread become very different when they cease to be something commonplace and become something that must be worked for, that is uncertain, that we may not have enough of. That we, maybe, have to pray for - "Give us this day our daily bread" becomes more than a sentence we say by rote.

Too many of our brothers and sisters in this world do not have enough bread to be healthy and comfortable. And yet, for most of us, it really is something taken for granted. (And there is so much bad bread out there - or maybe not BAD so much as indifferent. Bread that you eat because it is on your plate or part of a "balanced meal," but which you really don't hunger for, either because you already have so much, or because it is carelessly made and not appealing).

I do think stopping - whether formally, before each meal, to ask grace (which I think is a good habit to be in - and even if you don't really follow a faith-path, to do what the Buddhists talk about, and think about how it "takes 99 people to make your meal") or casually, from time to time, to realize that so many of the things we take for granted - that we don't even notice, or count as our "due" in life - are things our ancestors could not even have dreamed of, or, that they had to work so hard to bring into being (heat, for example: I go home, I am cold, I turn a dial on the thermostat and the heat comes on. I don't have to chop and carry wood, start a fire, make sure I don't smoke myself out of the house. Or water: I don't have to draw it from a well and carry it across my yard, then put it on a (likely wood-fired) stove to heat for bathing, I just need turn on a tap).

Actually, I think of another poem, Thanksgiving. About how sometimes gratitude includes things we do NOT have, things we are NOT subjected to.

So stopping, taking a deep breath, and realizing that in even small things most of us are deeply blessed, blessed far beyond our deserts. Whether it is bread or heat or water or a roof over our heads. And it is important (and all of us forget this - and I definitely include myself in that "us") not to spend so much of our time reaching and grasping and looking beyond what we have to what we do not have, that others have, and wishing for it, to the point where we fail to see all we have and fail to be grateful for it.