Blood and Bread

Take off your boots and scrape dust in a pot
And plant inside a tiny grain of wheat.
Up from the dirt a blade of green will rise
To bear upon its stalk twelve times itself.

Cut off the head and grind it into dust
And buried under water set aside,
Enclosed in darkened rooms where molds do grow.
There will the seed with new breath rise again.

But life not of itself, but of the yeast,
That dwells within the vapors of the wind,
Attaching to the crushed seed of this blade,
Which from your boots the seed of life upsprung.

Then furnaced by a flame this living dough
Is hardened, as in death, when it expires,
Releasing from itself the living breath
That gives shape to the spaces in itself.

Upon the shelf this loaf of wheat will sit
Until the hand of holy man it breaks
In two, and places it upon brass plate,
To feed five thousand faces who march forth,

Proclaiming that the bread of death they took
Has filled them with new life, from seed upsprung
From dust of feet who son of man has washed
Into a cleansing pot where death collects.

The armies of these bodies who do fall
Into the ground, where space and time do grind
Them into dust, which from new seeds do spring,
Attest that as they eat, they also live,

As dough that wet with water from above
Does fall upon them as they play their part,
And never live, nor die, not as themselves,
But as the spirit, that in all things does.