Poetry

Breading itself

Breading itself,
the starter stirs,
no effort made,
just bubblinating.

Slow fermentation,
essential biological processes.
Quite thick,
quite sour,
a hardworking one.

Oh sourdough starter,
how you work,
simply by being,
simply by breathing
and metabolising,
you create culture,
greater than the personal culture
of some people.

You are a symbiosis,
a mixture of bacteria
and many other beings.
How is it
that in my little jar
they coexist without obstacles,
while at the level of human society,
we keep falling apart?

Bacteria have no politics,
yeast has no history.
They have no interests,
beyond fermentation
and they don’t build identity
on the suffering of other symbiotic cultures.

If bacteria had a political instinct,
there would have been a war
in my jar long ago.
Left vs right,
commercial yeast vs organic,
the gluten vs gluten-free divide,
and a referendum
on fermentation temperature.

Maybe I’ll just:
bake this bread,
eat this bread,
and see if it tastes better
than these musings.