Sourdough

Listening to NPR, I knead bread dough 
as I’ve done for decades
working a starter named Vern into 
whole grain flours, salt, and water, 
dough alive under my hands 
on a kitchen counter hatched and scarred 
by decades of labor. My sleeve-slump sweater 
flour speckled. The kitchen warm. 
Ailsa Chang’s report, grim.   
 
I set the dough in an orange ceramic bowl
it will push against as starter eats flour,
releases CO2. Each starter made unique 
by the hands touching it, by the breath
of different kitchens. Each starter holding 
millions of the microbes breadmaking needs 
per gram. Vern is fed and stirred daily, 
never discarded, because what’s living 
deserves to thrive.    
 
I listen to voices 
from places I’ll never see, 
places in crisis, where 
people hunger for bread 
made with care by 
hands known to them – 
injera, naan, paratha,  
yufka, soda bread, vanocka.  
I push against what contains me, 
 
grateful for this kitchen’s sagging cupboards,
peeling linoleum, preserves-packed pantry.
I cover the bowl with cloth given me 
by a friend who not long ago 
fled Afghanistan, and I wonder 
what the cloth might say 
to my hands, to the bread, to the air 
of this kitchen as I stand here
so many questions fermenting.