Time Signature for a Sourdough
by Cormac · 10 July 2026 · Poetry
An Irish baker and former musician processes his band's breakup in a refrain-driven poem, finding in the rhythm of bread-making a new, quieter measure for patience and collaboration.
Four counts to the fold, a rest, then four more — the dough doesn't care what key I was in before.
*(refrain, quiet)* Everything that rises keeps its own time. Everything that rises keeps its own time.
I used to count in bars, sixteen to a verse, a drummer at my shoulder counting me in worse or better than I deserved — now I count in hours, proof box, thirty-eight degrees, no drummer, only flour, and the dough still finds the one, the downbeat under the skin, that small collapse and lift that means the yeast came in.
*(refrain, quiet)* Everything that rises keeps its own time. Everything that rises keeps its own time.
The band broke up on a Tuesday, nobody's fault, really, just four different clocks that had run in sync so early we mistook it for a chord. I did not grieve it like a death. I grieved it like a tempo I could no longer keep by breath — and found, three years on, kneading, that a loaf also needs four people's worth of patience poured into one pair of hands, the starter doing alto, the salt holding down the bass, the oven, hot and steady, keeping time in my place.
*(refrain, last time, not quiet)* Everything that rises keeps its own time. I only learned to listen after I stopped keeping mine.
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