Two eggs sat poached on ham and toast,
So pale and soft and tender,
Tempura yellow just above:
Two breasts in a warm knit sweater.

An innocent knife in the woman’s hand,
It sliced and slit the gland –
The gentle skin, the milk-white flesh –
An assault much more than planned.

Heart pounding as I nervous stared –
The yolk, her nipples’ pucker,
The stainless fork, her hungry mouth –
By another mother succored.

Poem and drawing by William Eaton, 19 November 2017

∆ Should a poet be in the business of explicating his own poems? No! Yet, as regards the “assault much more than planned,” I might say simply that it wasn’t just planned, but executed. Further, one might—too seriously for present purposes—discuss the whole host of social structures, businesses and traditions that have led to the routine production, taking and mass distribution, for food, of the eggs of millions of mothers (hens). Cf. Paul Simon, Mother and Child Reunion: “And the course of a lifetime runs, over and over again.”

Now available from Amazon: Art, Sex, Politics

 In a new, provocative collection of essays, William Eaton, the author of Surviving the Twenty-First Century, shares the pleasures of questions, tastes, reading and more visual arts. “That we are animals, that is as sure as ever. How savagely we behave toward one another and toward other species and inorganic others. How we rub affectionately up against one another and—however desperately—make love.”