Manna.

A food of nations and lonely lovely people.
The sort of sustenance to be sought and never found.
Falling from cumulus--dense and white as cauliflower heads--
A pile of swelling pale; nearly transparent at its best.

Nourishment toward which feet always clamor in a hurricaine of hoping and being.
Pouring as rain into upward facing palms and dirty filthy fingers.
Fulfillment as an entirely unattainable grace, balls of slippery wet oils
perpetual tumblings, rolling reliable as they are grappled to the ground.

A faith with unshakable bounds and cables taught and strong as a thousand bronze-neck men, shoulders reaching limits and knots of wiry muscle to the point of breaking skin.
A prayer on a day of spring with thick humming black flies carrying sounds and syllables in their wings a'flutter with voices of tearful, strangled women.

Yeasty risings thin as paper split with blades of piercing impossibilites.
Melting on tongues of pale pink uneven planes, like butter in the sun and babies in the arms of mother's singing.
Tasteless as Israel's sand on the lips of wandering men sunning in delirium and dancing through imagined oases of clear running water.

To begin decent, down through thick desert air--fleshy and suffocating--
wisps on the breeze-tide to save the men and women and children, promised and punished.
Tracing the leaves of drying foliage and needles of deep green cacti
A precipitate to all the lovely lonely people.  Like rain, like prayer.