On Eggshells
Whether you walk on eggshells
or stomp on them, you will
trample them. To compile
a pound of eggshells, you would
need six hundred twenty-five
empties. Tiptoes and caution
still shatter calcium carbonate.
Anyway, they were made to
be broken. You are noisy
even when you are silent,
the world is dripping with
Do Not Disturb signs in
languages we don’t even
recognize as languages.
As a hearing aid with the
volume cranked lets out
a squeal, you are loud
because you are here.
There's something wonderfully zen about this, Hannah. It reads like a koan by Dogen. I love it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I like to remember that eggshells are good for us, and how the earthworms love them.
ReplyDeleteThere is damage in being -- in simply being -- isn't there? Yes, we break the world by brushing against it. And the world abrades us away....
ReplyDeleteLove it.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much truth in this poem!
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me that the derivation of the idiom is unsettled.
This is wonderfully unapolgetic, a kind of damn the torpedoes battle cry.
ReplyDeleteLOVE IT...also love eggshells but not walking on them x
ReplyDeleteBravo to this!
ReplyDeleteExcellent read.