PROVING

Use your loaf of bread = use your head 

Use yer Loaf, Love! – I can hear Dad now,
as my sisters revised for a music exam,
as I tried to tie laces or light a match

or work out a way to get the bus home –
Use yer Loaf! – perhaps because
he had to practice piano, do his tax return,

or else because he knew the dark
would be lit by ourselves alone.
Stories told us to carry a crust

to ward off unwanted fairies, and
that offering bread to a mysterious guest
could grant a wish or raise the dead.

Every Saturday we made our own bread,
plumping up pale boules of dough
into fancy shapes, left to prove

on buttered trays below a misted window:
my twists and plaits, my sisters’ sculptures –
houses and cats and roses and swans.

We entered the forest one by one.
I watched my sisters’ torches blinking ahead,

dwindling down among the dark trees
and disappearing at turns in the path.

I followed their breadcrumbs as I laid down my own,
already sensing the branches stirring above

with jackdaws and magpies, ready to feast
on our hapless way-marker through the woods,

Dad’s echoing Love obscured by their cackles
that we, such fools, hadn’t chosen white stones,

That old mistake! They should stop
before they go on!

but by then we didn’t need

to find our way home,

didn’t look back to see

if the breadcrumbs had gone.