Two eggs sat poached on ham and toast,

So pale, so soft, so tender,

Tempura yellow just above:

Two breasts in a warm knit sweater.

An innocent knife in a woman’s hand,

It sliced and slit the arching gland –

The gentle skin, the milk-white flesh –

An assault though however unplanned.

Heart pounding I most nervous stared –

The yolk (and her nipples’ pucker).

The stainless fork, her hungry mouth –

To be succored by another mother.

— Poem(s) and drawing by William Eaton

∆ 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.”
  And my own 4 billion eggs:

It’s not just a matter of eggs, farming,

Economics, statistics, stress-resistant

Packaging, efficient distribution systems.

There are other kinds of hunger.

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.”