Bread and Revolutions
A Poem
While I was in Russia in 1929 every Izvoshchik [carriage driver] would ask me as soon as I got into his droshka [carriage]: What is the price of bread in your country?
(Rebecca Reyher, 2 April 1974)
What is the price of bread in your town?
Flour is cheap in one season,
Expensive in another.
The market records its global figures
with admirable precision.
Yet the ledger, for all its diligence,
does not count every cost.
There are forgotten farmers,
crucified by credit for seed, fertiliser,
and pesticide.
There are bakers, before dawn,
who rise to knead the dough,
to measure water against grain,
to trust that fire will do its work.
Hands remember what statistics forget.
What is the price of bread in your town?
Bread is not merely flour and fire, but
the wars in faraway lands,
the blocked waterways,
the field measured by surveyors,
the railway siding at dawn,
the exhausted hand upon the lever,
the child whose sleep is curtailed
by the noise of the factory whistle.
Don’t ask the economists:
they can only explain the movement of figures
with elegant impartiality.
Ask the parent who counts the coins
beneath the indifferent clock.
Ask the workers who delay their food,
the unemployed studying the price list
as though it were a political text.
Hunger, being practical, distrusts abstraction.
What is the price of bread in your town?
When bread gets expensive, as it does,
old grievances awaken:
forgotten speeches, unpaid debts,
the memory of promises.
Cities learn this lesson repeatedly.
The lesson alters its costume,
changes its slogans,
acquires new brands and websites,
but keeps the same severe grammar.
Bread, work, bread, work, bread.
What begins as a private inconvenience
may end in the public square.
A government may command armies,
possess prisons, archives, ceremonies;
yet its authority rests finally
upon ordinary meals.
What is the price of bread in your town?
None can govern long
against an empty stomach.
(Rio de Janeiro, 7 June 2026).
Samira Touman in Gaza, Palestine, makes cookies for Eid (photograph: Abdelhakim Abu Riash of al-Jazeera).
A thoughtful and intellectually rich civic poem that transforms the price of bread into a meditation on labor, dignity, economic justice, and political legitimacy, though its argumentative strength occasionally outweighs its poetic imagery.
In the wake of the great Bengali poets...