Speck of cheese,
dot of bread,
slivered hint of once pie.
They stir up our hunger,
send a flare down
desire’s dark hole,
invite us to rise up again from here.
A crumb of bird humming
contends, hungry, with the bee.
Green-back glow and the long beak
sneaks into flowers with smooth insertion
until each is entered and emptied.
Crumble at my feet:
sediment raised form below crust;
its billon-year body shifted and smashed
in descending order:
boulder
cobble
pebble
granule
sand
silt
clay
A precise language for the making of crumbs.
From the Old English cruma,
a word of obscure origin
traced back to the Latin
gruma, heap of earth.
And here language’s leavings
are larger than we’d dared imagine,
fill our pockets
with bits of earth and bread,
send us forward
throwing
our crumbs
& ourselves
away.
Carolyn Cushing is a poet inspired by nature and currently obsessed with cells and the first flaring forth of the universe. She has published in Freshwater and was a finalist for the Philbrick Poetry Award of the Providence Athenaeum in 2012.