Poetry Friday -- Boiled Eggs

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Steve Johnson

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.

(the rest of the poem can be found at A Writer's Almanac)

My environmental club kids were getting ready to create short videos of a bunch of the suggestions in 31 Ways To Change the World. They were having a hard time understanding how knowing your food could change the world, so I shared this poem with them, and then we thought about where our snack had come from -- fresh apples perhaps from last year's harvest in Washington state (and the machinery, trucks, and boxes to get them to us); apple juice (the apples, plus juicing machinery and plastic packaging for the cup); even just the box for our cereal bars (trees grown, harvested, ground and pulped, plus ink and machines to fold and fill and label each box). Maybe if we start with this kind of appreciation, we can raise kids who will make more mindful purchases and eat healthier (both for themselves and the environment).

Liz has the Poetry Friday roundup today at Elizabeth Steinglass.