This week’s poem, Sharif S. Elmusa’s “Watching the Bread Rise,” is one of 50 poems in the new Littoral Books anthology “Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest,” edited by Claire Millikin and Agnes Bushell, in which Maine poets raise their voices against injustice. I love the subtlety and distillation of Elmusa’s poem, and how grounded it is in a simple, daily lunchtime act – right until the breathtaking turn of the last three lines, when the poem’s meaning suddenly opens and hones.

A book launch for “Enough!,” featuring a reading by poets from the anthology, will be co-hosted by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Space Gallery on Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. on Zoom. For more details, go to mainewriters.org/calendar.

Elmusa is a scholar and poet. In addition to academic publications on the environment, he co-edited “Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry” and authored the poetry collection “Flawed Landscape.” His poems and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He holds a doctorate from MIT and is professor emeritus at the American University in Cairo.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are now open. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers, and other underrepresented voices. There is a link to submit in the credits below.

 

Watching the Bread Rise

By Sharif S. Elmusa

for Roberto Bonazzi

 

Pandemic and natural selection

immure me in my cave.

The paintings on the wall

come from Cairo, Cordoba

and Rome. Lunch time.

I toast the bread, as I often do—

a white flour tortilla

thin as vellum

a frozen loaf sensing the heat.

Takes a deep breath; unfolds

wholly flat on the rack.

Feeling firm, on solid grounds

in the glowing chamber,

it starts to rise, and rise

like a belly with child

like the flood tide

swelling across the land.

I watch with credulous delight

the evolving landscape

of peaks and dales

delectable beauty

of gold and brown.

Please, don’t play with fire,

it says, one more minute

and I burn.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Watching the Bread Rise,” copyright © 2020 by Sharif S. Elmusa, appears in “Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest,” published by Littoral Books in 2020. It appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of November. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.

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