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PN Review 275
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This poem is taken from PN Review 36, Volume 10 Number 4, March - April 1984.

Black Bread Tom Paulin

Splitting birches, spiky thicket, kinship -
this is the passionate, the phonic surface
I can take only on trust, like a character
translated to a short story whose huge language
he doesn't know. So we break black bread
in the provinces and can't be certain
what it is we're missing, or what sacrament
this might be, the loaf wrapped in a shirt-tail
...


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