Return To The Hearth

By Salem Youngblood

I once lived in the dark.

In a place where no fire cooked or simmered.

Where no love spoke or sighed.

The knives I brandished did not prepare butter

Nor butter bread, and there was no need to, anyway.

They were to whisper their serrated threat--

This skin is yours for breaking.

In that place I consumed years

Gray, unknowing, on a tongue that spoke only ash

Salt and sugar could not warm me

No dish could rise, no seasoning season.

Despair was a butcher, though,

And one day it guided my hands to the pots, the pans,

Intent on nothing less than a test of my senses.

I tossed spices with a madness--

Spoons full of cinnamon, whirling dervishes

Pepper and pepper and pepper,

A cloud, a storm of clove and nutmeg.

More than the recipes called for, more than

Sense would allow, into the pot they went

In a stew of ghosts of hungers long since dead.

There was a spark at last--

A tongue remembered a long-forgotten fire

Ash that turned to bitterness to sweetness, bit by bit.

Cinnamon wild for homecoming, crackling,

Vanilla chanting its dark liturgy--

The mouth remembers when grief churns, finally.

Flavor lit the dark.

The oven glowed like magic,

Heat a kindness I had not known before.

Sugar in the mouth an incantation, an invocation,

Made the broken marrow ache.

What had been broken and sealed and dead,

Was undone by butter in its slow and holy way--

The crust and cake and loaves like prayers, slowly

Prayed to a spirit that just might find you.

With no knives upon the tendons, with no sobs

At the cutting and hacking and rendering of bones--

But with the hands that worked the dough, with the bread

That rose, came resurrection for a ragged heart.

The feast became the sermon, the oven sang the psalm--

In the steam was salvation, in the dough a balm.

Though spectres gather, though the shadows crowd,

I, with hands sticky with sugar, knead the light aloud.

By Salem Youngblood