The Dakota winter falls,
and the kitchen smells of yeast,
as a man with flour to the wrist,
kneads with the same push,
the same leaning of the whole body into softness,
the same fists that stuck from fever,
only now the dough forgives him,
and rises where a woman once went quiet
in the next crying room.

He tells the tape recorder plainly,
I hit,
as if confession were a loaf you could slice open
and find the Liverpool boy inside,
still living,
mother gone two-fold, father an unhinged door
left swinging,
the docks teaching him that only tenderness bleeds.

So peace, he says, was never about gentleness,
only the work of unlearning,
of hearing the hymns sung by those most afraid
of his untethered hands.

And here is Sean sleeping,
and here is Yoko dreaming,
and here the long unglamorous labour of unlearning,
the fist in soft dough,
the shifting from rage to being the lover kneading,
nearly done, nearly risen, the oven door
just opening with its breath of heat and mercy.

But the pavement, cold as a verdict, calls him down,
down, down, into a doorway of December,
and all the bread of healing
is left cooling on the sill.

For John Lennon, who unlearned

27/9/2026