Today’s Poem: Bread and Wine

Bread’s not so dry when dipped in wine

Frédéric Bazille, Black Woman with Peonies, 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Bread and Wine

by Countee Cullen

From death of star to new star’s birth,
    This ache of limb, this throb of head,
This sweaty shop, this smell of earth,
    For this we pray, “Give daily bread.”

Then tenuous with dreams the night,
    The feel of soft brown hands in mine,
Strength from your lips for one more fight:
    Bread’s not so dry when dipped in wine.
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Last May, a year ago, we offered a poem by Countee Cullen (1903–1946): “Saturday’s Child,” a nursery rhyme twisted into a bitter reflection on poverty.

Countee Cullen in 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)

Cullen was raised as the adopted child of a Harlem minister before his meteoric rise, through New York University and Harvard, to become a central figure of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s ­— and images drawn from religion occur often in his work. That needs to be carefully phrased. In his highly formal poetry, religious themes appear much less often than do religious figures and images, which he uses to express his non-religious romantic and racial themes.

And so with “Bread and Wine.” Borrowing from the Lord’s Prayer, he ends the first of his two quatrains, rhymed abab, with a prayer for daily bread. And he ends the second with an image of communion: “Bread’s not so dry when dipped in wine.” Interspersed in this poem from Cullen’s 1925 book Color are lines about the struggle to make a living in the day and a spouse’s gift of love in the night that sustains the fighter in the daylight fight for life.

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