Baking the Bread, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

The serving maids made bread for the Sundays,
With the best milk, with the best grain,
Brow bent, elbows jutting past their sleeves,
Sweat wetting them and running into the kneading trough.

Their hands, their fingers, their whole bodies steamed with haste,
Their throats stirred in their full bodices.
Their two monstrous fists paddled through the dough
And shaped it into rounds like the flesh of breasts.

The burnt wood cracked into red embers
And two by two, from the edge of a plank, the long peels
Into the bellies of the ovens thrust the soft loaves.

And the flames, through the maws opening a passage,
Like a huge warm pack of tawny dogs,
Leaped, roaring to bite them in the face.

Emile Verhaeren

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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