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Malgorzata Sady

Presentation - BreadMatters I, Lublin, Poland

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Lublin

These short pieces are images in words, memories evoked by the word bread. They are presented in a way my mind as an interpreter often works, translating said / written thoughts from one language to the other; lines in Polish and English intertwining. Juxtaposition of sounds / letters and spaces.

Two more bi-lingual poems are hung on the wall, one a popular Polish rhyme translated into Semantic Poetry, a style invented by Stefen Themerson, and a Dylon Thomas poem 'The Bread I Break'. After the reading, I unroll two long scrolls of paper with all the quotations from the bible in which the word Bread appears, one in Polish, the other in English.

The space filled / defined by spoken and written words, created / brought back by naming.



A slice of bread in water
and then in sugar
A road hot in the sun
burns bare feet
soft dust between toes lighter than air
Under the huge ash-tree shade
many years will pass before it is cut down
at the corner of the house a gutter
under it stones and pieces of coloured glass, always wet
A jasmin bush that enters the room
and there in the middle in bed
shielding with mum's wedding veil
I listen to books read to me
In the bottom drawer of a dark oak wardrobe
hidden treasures
A day never ends


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Too little of us
Too little of us
To bake bread

We need you
We need you
here too


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You may read horizontally the melody of this poem, but you may also take each of its words and score it vertically for your whole intellectual orchestra, you may give each of them the flesh of exact definition; instead of allowing them to evoke the cliche's stored in your mind, you may try to find the true reality to which each word points, and that is what I call Semantic Poetry. Stefan Themerson - 'Bayamus'

A number which                                                of a group of people referred to in
is not satisfactory                                             1st person plural

A number which                                                         of a group of people referred to in
is not satisfactory                                             1st person singular

to cook by dry heat in an oven
                   food made by mixing flour with water and yeast
                             kneading, and cooking by dry heat in an oven

a group of people referred to in                       feels under a necessity
1st person plural                                                or obligation

in relation to the person addressed

a group of people referred to in                       feels under a necessity
1st person singular                                                or obligation

in relation to the person addressed

at this very point or place
too


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Dylan Thomas - This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat
This wine upon a foreign tree
Ploughed in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the wine
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun' pulled the wind down.

This flesh I break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein
Were oat and the grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

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My poem about bread

When I went to visit the world for the first time
and returned later
my grandmother asked me
- How does bread taste like there?
I tried to describe
but can one describe a taste of bread?
- Next time bring with you at least a little piece

From that time on I have been carrying bread both ways
And I do not forget that always before starting a new loaf my
grandmother would draw with a knife a big sign of the cross on the
bottom of a huge round loaf
© Malgorzata Sady - June 2000

Lublin















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