Bread: A Fifteener

After Dumina Frzop’s story

In the homeland we had to struggle for a piece of bread.

Slept in one room on the floor, cooked in a komin,

no time for the unopened page of hope to be read.

Made money selling wine & oil built-in

survival, our spirits too weary for song & dance & stories.

Paper is as heavy as wood. Reading is like feeding crumbs

to birds, you get a little, you come back for more.

If we had had enough bread, we might not have come

to Australia. There was fear in the air and talk of war.

My husband left in 1937. For two years we waited

for the unfinished book of our lives to be written.

Then my son and I followed, hungry for more crumbs.

I still think of that brick oven for baking bread, now smitten

with my wood-fired Metters stove. Bags of flour, grocery sums,

add up to a better life. I write postcards home, tell them about the bread,

but

not

the

crumbs.