My name is Padre Gautuma and I used to think that poetry and religion too was about

describing the transcendent, you know, the things you couldn't put your hands on.

But these days I find myself more and more interested in poems and religion that are

paying attention to the things you can put your hands on, the things you can taste, the

things that appeal to the senses, and not trying to capture them or trying to say here's

what they mean, but trying to pay attention to them and to be beheld by them as you

behold them.

All bread by Margaret Outwood. All bread is made of wood, cow-don, packed brown moss, the

bodies of dead animals, the teeth and backbones, what is left after the ravens. This dirt

flows through the stems into the grain, into the arm, nine strokes of the axe, skin from

a tree, good water, which is the first gift, four hours.

Live burial under a moist cloth, a silver dish, the row of white famine bellies swollen

and taught in the oven, long foes of warm breath stopped in the heat from an old sun.

Good bread has the salt taste of your hands after nine strokes of the axe, the salt taste

of your mouth, it smells of its own small death of the deaths before and after.

Left these ashes into your mouth, your blood, to know what you devour is to consecrate

it, almost. All bread must be broken so it can be shared. Together we eat this earth.

You know I remember the first time I ever read anything by Margaret Outwood, which was

years ago, the blind assassin, which is one of her novels had just come out. So I then

after that began to read as much of hers as I could, which is difficult because there's

so much and I had not known she was a poet until I started to go to the library and find

some more of her poetry books. And this is the poem of hers that I keep on coming back

...