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Smith, Austin, 1982- / In the silence of the migrated birds: poems
(2008)
My mother, baking bread, p. 32
Page 32
My Mother, Baking Bread -for my mother and mygrandmother Baking bread, my mother raises her hands ghost-white with flour towards the morning growing out of the East. The dawn is yeasted light. Her hands are the hands of her Jewish mothers who came westward from old Russia through the ashes of the Holocaust across the Atlantic to be given the name Miller (of grain) and on over many rivers to this land where we have made a home. The sun follows the same road. While we were sleeping light flooded the window of a Russian kitchen. Dough rising before the sun or her sons, my mother and her mothers knead and need with the same white hands. 32
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