Bread and Time
- Jul 24, 2020
- 2 min read
by Eleanor Lerman
Being chained to the final floor of a deserted tower on a burning road in a vanquished county that has been stricken from the maps has done nothing to lessen the power of the Persons of Final Becoming
They could be bound by a curse to be buried beneath the shifting sands and still be able to direct your fate. There are six of them or nine or twenty-seven, depending on which story you believe,
how far back into prehistory you are willing to follow the clues But while you’re asking rocks and rivers to remember what they saw one day a boy will appear on the horizon, armed by the Jews, eager for revenge
The sun will nod once in his direction and women will perform the ritual of cooking his final meal. Watch for him on your little screens and in the clouds that cover the morning. All we need
is for just one of us to admit that we need help, the kind that comes with a memory of the divine disguised as a faithful dog who follows us across the mountains, who is the love we lived for, who lays down the law
Then we can break the world with a hammer and all boys will be reborn, all girls. Give them bread and time and retell the story: the best one will be about the day we knew enough to start to cross the mountains and finally recognize the truth about that dog
Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, a recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. In 2016, her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press), was awarded the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. In 2018, her novel, The Stargazer’s Embassy (Mayapple Press), received an American Fiction Award. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street (The Permanent Press, 2019), has been named a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Eric Hoffer Award. www.eleanorlerman.com
