The Bread Maker’s Last Testament

You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
—Warson Shire

The night I heard the clock count down
the final hours of my life,
my son-in-law came to me and said
We have no future here. This war will kill us.

What could I do,
but remind him that we make bread,
and every morning people buy it.
They’ll feed it to their children, I told him,
a few hours from now, in the early dawn,
with tea and sugar—

Nevertheless, my son-in-law said, I am taking
your daughter and your grandson. We are going.
His face rose like a mountain in a storm,
and I became a man in mourning.

What could I do
but invite spiders to drop from the rafters
bid weevils to eat their fill of our flour sacks?
Let bombs and the men with guns take the rest.

Later, in the little boat,
when the sea lifted its iron arm
and struck me with the cold of its flesh,
I fell into its mouth and it swallowed me,
though I was not like the one
who fled God and was eaten by a fish.
There was for me only the belly of the ocean,
and this hunger for my children more than for bread.

What could I do,
but enter it?

MARIA ROUPHAIL is a member of the faculty of the English Department at North Carolina State University, where she teaches courses in World Literature and serves as an academic adviser. She holds a PhD. in literature from The Ohio State University, and is a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the North Carolina Poetry Society. She has won recognition by the NCPS, having twice been a finalist in the Poet Laureate competition. The author of Apertures, which won Honorable Mention in Finishing Line Press’s “New Women’s Voices” competition, she has published in Pinesong, International Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, and One. She has garnered Honorable Mention in the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival competition. Second Skin is her newest collection of poems.