Thursday, September 25, 2008

Eggs and salt

A Quiet Life

by Baron Wormser

What a person desires in life

is a properly boiled egg.

This isn’t as easy as it seems.

There must be gas and a stove,

the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,

banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.

There must be a pot, the product of mines

and furnaces and factories,

of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,

of women in kerchiefs and men with

sweat-soaked hair.

Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies

and God knows what causes it to happen.

There seems always too much or too little

of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping

stations, towers, tanks.

And salt--a miracle of the first order,

the ace in any argument for God.

Only God could have imagined from

nothingness the pang of salt.

Political peace too. It should be quiet

when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums

knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are

ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and

take it out on you, no dictators

posing as tribunes.

It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear

the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type

of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.

Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain

that came from nowhere.

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