Egg

Aleš Šteger

 
When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don't notice
That the egg grows an eye in death.
It is so small, it doesn't satisfy
Even the most modest morning appetite.
But it already watches, already stares at your world.
What are its horizons, whose glassy-eyed perspectives?
Does it see time, which moves carelessly through space?
Eyeballs, eyeballs, cracked shells, chaos or order?
Big questions for such a little eye at such an early hour.  
And you – do you really want an answer?
When you sit down, eye to eye, behind a table,
You blind it soon enough with a crust of bread.
 
Copyright © 2011 by Aleš Šteger. Reprinted from The Book of Things with the permission of BOA Editions.

Further Reading

Poems about Breakfast
Breakfast
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
During Wind and Rain
by Thomas Hardy
Morning in the Burned House
by Margaret Atwood
On the Terrace
by Landis Everson
Poems about Eating
A Wicker Basket
by Robert Creeley
Apples
by Grace Schulman
Breakfast
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Dead Horse
by Thomas Lux
Dream In Which I Meet Myself
by Lynn Emanuel
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass
Eating Together
by Li-Young Lee
Man Eating
by Jane Kenyon
The Book of the Dead Man (Food)
by Marvin Bell
To a Poor Old Woman
by William Carlos Williams
Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries
by Stanley Plumly