Ode to bread

by Pablo Neruda

Bread, you rise from flour, water and fire.
Dense or light, flattened or round,
you duplicate the mother's rounded womb,
and earth's twice-yearly swelling.
How simple you are, bread,
and how profound!


You line up on the baker's powdered trays
like silverware or plates or pieces of paper
and suddenly life washes over you,
there's the joining of seed and fire,
and you're growing, growing
all at once like hips, mouths, breasts, mounds of earth,
or people's lives.

The temperature rises, you're overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar of fertility,
and suddenly your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs were seeded,
a brown scar laid its burn the length
of your two halves' toasted juncture.


Now, whole, you are mankind's energy,
a miracle often admired, the will to live itself.

O bread familiar to every mouth,
we will not kneel before you:
men do no implore unclear gods or obscure angels:
we will make our own bread out of sea and soil,
we will plant wheat on our earth and the planets,
bread for every mouth, 
for every person, our daily bread. 


Because we plant its seed and grow it
not for one man but for all,
there will be enough:
there will be bread
for all the peoples of the earth.
And we will also share with one another
whatever has
the shape and the flavor of bread:
the earth itself, beauty and love --
all taste like bread
and have its shape,
the germination of wheat.


Everything
exists to be shared,
to be freely given,
to multiply.

This is why, bread, if you flee
from mankind's houses,
if they hide you away or deny you,
if the greedy man pimps for you 
or the rich man takes you over,
if the wheat does not yearn for the furrow and the soil:
then, bread, we will refuse to pray:
bread, we will refuse to beg.

We will fight for you instead, side by side with the others,
with everyone who knows hunger.
We will go after you in every river and in the air.
We will divide the entire earth among ourselves
so that you may germinate,
and the earth will go forward with us:
water, fire, and mankind fighting at our side.


Crowned with sheafs of wheat, 
we  will win earth and bread for everyone.
Then life itself will have the shape of bread,
deep and simple, 
immeasurable and pure.
Every living thing will have its share of soil and life,
and the bread we eat each morning,
everyone's daily bread,
will be hallowed and sacred,
because it will have been won
by the longest and costliest
of human struggles.

This earthly Victory does not have wings:
she wears bread on her shoulders instead.
Courageously she soars, setting the world free,
like a baker born aloft on the wind.