I’m struck dumb suddenly by this egg, this enormity.
This immense incomprehensible oval and its lovely silence.
It’s the Irish countryside’s dusk-quiet unribboned by the peeling of potatoes.
The peeler’s stuttered isk, isk, isk is k is ki s k i s k i s
The unfolding of cardstock wings, the rustle against a wood table.
And the tapping of a heavy egg against that wood.
A gentle thud, four times.
It hangs in the balance, as in an equinox.
Until the warm sheets are pulled back from the yolk. Yellow slumber. Sweet dreams poached by
no one. Little river of Gaelic sunrise flows viscous into a wood bowl, pulsing faintly.
But wait; no, it’s in the carton again, I haven’t yet begun—
There will be time later for frenetic atoms, the frenzied ecstatic rapture of molecules.
This year I’m making an egg for my father, and for my mother too.
Little bird begets little bird.