A poem to get you to the end of the week

Here's a gift of poetry from my Tennessee friend, Karen. 

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.