Breaking Bread

Uncanny, how much bread dough feels like flesh,
like dust inhabited by something else
arising, softening from stone to life,
made ready for the tearing and the knife.
And yet we come back to the kneading trough
as to the table: Needs we can’t shake off,
to make, to break, to love each other still,
confessing hungers we can never fill
until the heart that drives them stops its beat.
But we’re alive today. I made bread. Eat,
and find a moment’s satisfaction here.
It is enough, right now, that you are near,
this bread, this meal between us as a vow:
Though we will break (we know not when or how)
we will believe the feast was worth the fall.
We will hold on, though bound to lose it all
until the day we meet on a far shore 
where feast is all and famine is no more.
O God, come down and bless this breaking bread,
and take us where true hungers all are fed.