This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
November 11th is Veterans Day. Today's poet, Raina J. León, hails from a family with military service in all branches. As she explains it, today's poem, "The rising," juxtaposes love of family with the horrors of war.
Raina J. León, PhD, is Black and Afro-Boricua. The 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, she is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry, including black god mother this body. A founding editor of The Acentos Review, she co-founded both Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series and StoryJoy, Inc. She is recipient of numerous awards, including a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Award, and an Academy of American Poets Laureates Fellowship. She teaches at Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program, at the University of Southern Maine, and at Bryn Mawr College.
How might you describe the aroma of love? Is it like freshly baked bread? In Raina J. León's poem "The rising," a woman sends her soldier husband images of bread. Because mail is slow moving, "she points the computer's camera / at [each] perfect loaf, says smell . . . ." Far away, he "wants to be like bread, / kneaded by her fingers. . . ."
What happens, though, when their home suddenly smells like copper? Listen for the loss at the end of today's poem. Who, do you think, is bleeding?
Here’s "The rising" by Raina J. León.
The rising
He tells the other soldiers
before they go about their killing
that his woman at that moment
bakes bread to scent the house,
that for nearly one year she has baked
a different loaf and wrapped it tight
in cellophane so that he can see
her heart beating. The mail, too slow,
she points the computer’s camera
at the perfect loaf, says smell, and he does
through the screen. A viscous melody flows
down the nose into the open throat,
and he sings a moan of the familiar.
Every week, a different loaf – raisin,
banana nut, vanilla and peach – that he smells
first before the children devour
the bread that their love sets.
He tells the other soldiers
that when he goes home the curtains will exhale
the breath of bread, pears, cinnamon.
He tells them he wants to be like bread,
kneaded by her fingers, filled with sweetness,
baked within her oven body, then he carries
the gun and fills his eye light with darkened glass
and dust. That very afternoon a woman will wait
for her man. The house will smell of bread,
spice, and sweat, and then suddenly copper.
“The rising” by Raina J. León was previously published in Magma Journal in 2010 and in book form in "Boogeyman Dawn" (Salmon Poetry, 2014).
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
