The rich abundance of the still-life
painter's palette: glistening
pitchers; pewter kitchenware
battered like windfallen fruit;
fatted watermelons, grapes
and apricots; bushy heads
of cauliflower in season.
And sweetmeats. And bread.
Bread that no more has
a season than the air;
keeping bakers awake all night,
worrying over loaves.
A corner is nicked from this roll
painted with eggshell delicacy;
maybe the artist, unable to desist,
picked absent-mindedly at
the burnished crust, as when
a restaurant diner - all eyes
on the menu - fumbles with
the basket of plaited rolls.
Where to start? Remembered batch pans wrapped
like exquisite gifts in tissue paper when you were
despatched townward on your bike for a family loaf.
Mushy white sliced in waxed Coady’s Bakery packaging.
Homemade brown soda, rough and ready, signed off
with a dividing cross, yet reconciling divergent elements -
salt, buttermilk, baking soda, wholemeal flour - devising
a viable compromise arming them all. A harvest loaf with
ornarmental bark to carve through and reveal its inner grain,
leaving a trail of crumbs, like sawdust, on the breadboard.
Char-marked nan, flat as blini pancakes, chewy as pizza
base, coriander-enhanced. ghee-brushed, Sri Lanka—shaped.
Unconsecrated hosts, surplus to the church’s needs, doled out
by the school nun, savoured as a wafery ambroisan appetiser.
Brie-like wheels of flour-dusted sourdough - moist of crumb
and crisp of crust - cooling on the wire racks of a coffee shop
the time you stopped in pastel-painted clapboard Telluride.
The over-the-top iced raisin-and-walnut loaf your mother
loved to embellish further with a coating of lime marmalade.
Toast the moment of surrender when the fat hits the pan
and you yield to the full breakfast experience - bacon, sausage,
pudding, field mushrooms, potato cakes - mopping up
egg seepage with a dripping dodge of well-fried bread.
Exotic morning offerings, topped with poppy seeds, fortified
with sun-dried tomatoes you first sampled with bureaucratic
caution at the Euroflat Hotel in the EU quarter of Bruxelles.
All the slices of life bread has treated you to...
Fast-moving, computer-clockwatching, speed-dating
Ireland in its high-tech phase digests its daily bread as rapidly
as text messages. or chews it over at a lunchtime desk
with an urgent request for a ballpark profits forecast.
Office juniors form a breadline for chilli pesto rosso
baba ghanoush, baby spinach, yellow peppers on ciabatta.
Then the tough decisions: Cheri latte? Mocha machiato?
Best stick strictly to your health regimen: frosty fruits
smoothie, organic Caesar salad wrap. plastic tub
of watercolour melon chunks, detox glass of wheatgrass.
Irish taste buds configured in the bread-and butter
era, the donkey-cart-to-creamery age that no longer
dares to speak its shabby name, shamefully hunger
sometimes for the old values of the ham sandwich
in a scruffy lunch-hour pub: fat-framed meat in oval
slices. pink folds arrayed on greaseproof paper.
ready, at the half-twelve rush, to be sandwiched with
a wedge of processed cheddar, a slobbery tomato ring
lobbed in for good measure, a tattered lettuce leaf
revived under a cold water tap; white-sliced pan
of pre-focaccia. pre-tortilla days. buttered up incautiously
by the wheezing, plum-faced, sleeve-rolled barman;
cracked plate slapped down - take or leave it -
on a sudsy Guinness beermat. The great mainstay.
Plain or toasted. Pressed into service too with thermos
flask of home-brewed tea for a quick roadside elevenses
between house calls: the salty ham boiled or roasted.
mustard-boosted, pale or wood-smoked; rarest of all.
the joint reserved for special occasions - Christmas,
christenings, honey-glazed, clove-studded, carved thickly
from the bone, ridged with a kitchen knife‘s serrations.
painter's palette: glistening
pitchers; pewter kitchenware
battered like windfallen fruit;
fatted watermelons, grapes
and apricots; bushy heads
of cauliflower in season.
And sweetmeats. And bread.
Bread that no more has
a season than the air;
keeping bakers awake all night,
worrying over loaves.
A corner is nicked from this roll
painted with eggshell delicacy;
maybe the artist, unable to desist,
picked absent-mindedly at
the burnished crust, as when
a restaurant diner - all eyes
on the menu - fumbles with
the basket of plaited rolls.
Where to start? Remembered batch pans wrapped
like exquisite gifts in tissue paper when you were
despatched townward on your bike for a family loaf.
Mushy white sliced in waxed Coady’s Bakery packaging.
Homemade brown soda, rough and ready, signed off
with a dividing cross, yet reconciling divergent elements -
salt, buttermilk, baking soda, wholemeal flour - devising
a viable compromise arming them all. A harvest loaf with
ornarmental bark to carve through and reveal its inner grain,
leaving a trail of crumbs, like sawdust, on the breadboard.
Char-marked nan, flat as blini pancakes, chewy as pizza
base, coriander-enhanced. ghee-brushed, Sri Lanka—shaped.
Unconsecrated hosts, surplus to the church’s needs, doled out
by the school nun, savoured as a wafery ambroisan appetiser.
Brie-like wheels of flour-dusted sourdough - moist of crumb
and crisp of crust - cooling on the wire racks of a coffee shop
the time you stopped in pastel-painted clapboard Telluride.
The over-the-top iced raisin-and-walnut loaf your mother
loved to embellish further with a coating of lime marmalade.
Toast the moment of surrender when the fat hits the pan
and you yield to the full breakfast experience - bacon, sausage,
pudding, field mushrooms, potato cakes - mopping up
egg seepage with a dripping dodge of well-fried bread.
Exotic morning offerings, topped with poppy seeds, fortified
with sun-dried tomatoes you first sampled with bureaucratic
caution at the Euroflat Hotel in the EU quarter of Bruxelles.
All the slices of life bread has treated you to...
Fast-moving, computer-clockwatching, speed-dating
Ireland in its high-tech phase digests its daily bread as rapidly
as text messages. or chews it over at a lunchtime desk
with an urgent request for a ballpark profits forecast.
Office juniors form a breadline for chilli pesto rosso
baba ghanoush, baby spinach, yellow peppers on ciabatta.
Then the tough decisions: Cheri latte? Mocha machiato?
Best stick strictly to your health regimen: frosty fruits
smoothie, organic Caesar salad wrap. plastic tub
of watercolour melon chunks, detox glass of wheatgrass.
Irish taste buds configured in the bread-and butter
era, the donkey-cart-to-creamery age that no longer
dares to speak its shabby name, shamefully hunger
sometimes for the old values of the ham sandwich
in a scruffy lunch-hour pub: fat-framed meat in oval
slices. pink folds arrayed on greaseproof paper.
ready, at the half-twelve rush, to be sandwiched with
a wedge of processed cheddar, a slobbery tomato ring
lobbed in for good measure, a tattered lettuce leaf
revived under a cold water tap; white-sliced pan
of pre-focaccia. pre-tortilla days. buttered up incautiously
by the wheezing, plum-faced, sleeve-rolled barman;
cracked plate slapped down - take or leave it -
on a sudsy Guinness beermat. The great mainstay.
Plain or toasted. Pressed into service too with thermos
flask of home-brewed tea for a quick roadside elevenses
between house calls: the salty ham boiled or roasted.
mustard-boosted, pale or wood-smoked; rarest of all.
the joint reserved for special occasions - Christmas,
christenings, honey-glazed, clove-studded, carved thickly
from the bone, ridged with a kitchen knife‘s serrations.
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