There Is a Rhythm to the World

There is a rhythm to the world that

sends me

shamefaced

to stand in front of the egg section of the dairy aisle

in the dark days of December each year.

*

The reality is,

no one cares why you are buying eggs,

no one watches me

opening

the cartons

and gently shifting each egg to make sure none have broken.

*

I guess it proves to me

that I am not a farmer

(whose work I hold in deep respect)

but more of a dilettante.

And that is why I am standing here,

unobserved except for the shoppers

whose path I am obstructing.

*

You see, we have laying hens,

and, for some reason

hens need more than winter’s weak daylight to lay eggs.

As the days grow shorter

the time spent collecting the eggs from the nesting boxes,

and other, more secret places I know of grow shorter

until at last

the six grey boxes in the refrigerator

dwindle to none

at best, a small bowl,

or one egg alone on a shelf.

*

By not providing artificial light,

we allow the chickens to rest from their labors,

like everything else in nature,

and I am forced to sidle into the dairy aisle and ponder large, medium,

small, brown, white, free-range, organic, plastic, recycled pressed pulp board,

local, not so local, expiration dates,

expecting exposure and ridicule.

*

There should be an entire branch of philosophy based on egg-laying,

based on the fundamental truths inherent in an egg, the facts,

and our relationship to the invisible world within one.

*

Season

Chickens need a certain number of hours of daily light to lay.

It is for this reason chicken eggs came to symbolize the coming of spring,

fertility, new beginnings,

life,

a microcosm of our larger world.

We too can be born into spring, an awakening, an echo of creation.

*

Hold up an egg and look at its form.

Ponder these things in your heart also.

*

Protect

Layer upon layer of protection to the interior world,

encased by an outer shell.

A hard yet fragile vessel,

sheltering the spirit of life.

*

Embrace

Lovingly enfolding, the inner membrane holds the sun yolk and the white albumen, its sea, snugly within its steadfast enclosure.

*

Nurture

The yolk and the white of the egg feed us,

or when fertile, a nascent chick.

*

Live

The essence of life- the germinal disk,

a tiny dot,

orbiting the surface of the yolk

with the latent potential to create a birth too large for its world.

*

That old circle,

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

A puzzle equal in transcendence to the digits of pi.

Unexplored, unknowable parts of the world remain,

and the inside of an egg is one of the mysteries.

*

What else I know to be true, and real, is,

the day I will check the nesting box on a February morning

and there is an egg nestled in the hay,

still warm,

it is a proclamation that winter has relinquished its grasp,

and death will be,

once again,

defeated.

***********

Thank you for reading my words.

We are at the end of The Season of Greater Cold 大寒 (daikan) in the traditional Japanese calendar. The kanji characters for this season are simple: 大 (dai), which represents big, and 寒(kan), which indicates cold temperature.

This poem is written to celebrate the final micro-season of winter:

January 30–February 3: Hens Start Laying Eggs 鶏始乳 (niwatori hajimete toya ni tsuku)

The next three seasons are spring ones, leading up to the spring equinox.

You can find more of my seasonal writing journey in my list Micro-Season Poem Cycle with a Medium account. The collection was originally published in Scribe by editor Thomas Gaudex.

Spring is just around the corner.