[New-Poetry] from the Writer's Almanac

[Anny Ballardini]

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. 

"A Quiet Life" by Baron Wormser, from Scattered Chapters. © Sarabande Books, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 



Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080602/7bf62384/attachment.html