"Listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass in the kitchen" by Elizabeth Burns

Finally, I’m done with the phone calls and everything else

and when I switch on the radio it feels like lying in salt water –

all I need to do is breathe: Bach will keep me afloat.

I’m mixing yeast into flour, making rolls for my daughter’s

birthday breakfast in the morning, kneading and kneading

the dough then setting it to rise; arranging in a glass

the last of the tiny pink roses with a sprig of green,

finding the blue candles and ironing the tablecloth,

the one my granny embroidered, sweeping the floor,

thinking about the hot August night of the birth,

and about the people we met on Westray last week,

and the presents I still need to wrap, and Bach himself

who is like a mountain covered in wildflowers,

and the singers in the Albert Hall who, the conductor says,

get close to godliness through this performance;

and I’m wondering, as all those voices fill my kitchen

with the Mass, if this is what he means: the sense

of time and place dissolving, so what divides us

from the past and elsewhere, and from each other,

falls away, and everything’s connected and we are all

drops of water in this enormous breaking wave.