Next week I will be leading the Art as Prayer group that I have found myself to be a part of. The topic is Ordinary Time. A friend of mine commented, "I don't know what ordinary is anymore." Now that she has said that, I'm not sure I know either. My ordinary seems to change and get displaced a lot.
This poem, A Quiet Life by Baron Wormser from his book published in 2008 entitled Scattered Chapters, somehow fit into this little question of unknown ordinary even though I'm not a fan of boiled eggs.
A Quiet Life
By Baron Wormser from Scattered Chapters
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-owls 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 hoodlum
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 a chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at the bit of grain
that came from nowhere.
4 comments:
As a person who LOVES boiled eggs I also LOVE this poem. It reminds us that nothing really is simple, and yet it also IS simple.
Growing up we used to gorge ourselved on boild eggs every year at Easter. I think after doing that kind of thing of years I just got sick of them.
That's really quite wonderful. Examining the complexity of Ordinary :-) I enjoyed that. Thank you for sharing it.
For me, recognizing ordinary is quite difficult just now. I no longer have or recognize what has been my ordinary time. I've read ordinary time is a good 'gratitude' time - which is difficult to do when I can't identify my ordinary. So, I've opened myself up to go back to a few previous but safe/growth inspired places, activities etc. They weren't ordinary at the time but very special. For now, I'm taking them into my ordinary.
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