At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
Interviewed by Ashley Brown in 1966, Bishop said of “A Miracle for Breakfast”: 
 Oh, that’s my depression poem. I was written shortly after the soup-lines and men selling apples, 1936 or so. It was my social consciousness poem, a poem about hunger. 
 ( Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop , ed. George Monteiro) 
 
 2 of the end words, “coffee” and “crumb”, at opposite ends, perhaps, in the spectrum of sustenance, waft into the poem ceaselessly, joined up in different ways, culminating in the devoured coffee and crumb of the envoi. 
 

A Miracle For Breakfast