Poetry Friday: A Quiet Life

In times of crisis, I appreciate the ordinary. So now, when my life isn't particularly in crisis, I am trying to appreciate the ordinary, too, instead of waiting until it is gone. This week as I read about the earthquake in New Zealand and hurt for those people, as I understood exactly what they were going through, I thought of how grateful I am for a quiet life. Baron Wormser's take on that concept is to focus on a properly boiled egg. (I posted this poem once before, in June 2008.)

For the people of Christchurch, I wish a properly boiled egg, and other features of ordinary life, soon.


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.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at Read Write Believe.