on Birds, Birches, and the Joy of Eating Eggs

“It is the birthday of Robert Frost,”
You said over a bowl of soup
and I heard it as though
Garrison Keillor was sitting there, perhaps
because you are both from Minnesota,
and then, in that way of yours you added
“And I didn’t buy him anything.”
We both laughed and then fell silent
each working on poetry in our heads
tearing bread, spooning soup
Frost, like Dickenson, taking me back to my childhood
because they were the poets of my elementary
classrooms and I loved their words overtly
until sometime in college I was told
they were passé and of the lesser
poets and I felt my smallness of mind
but loved them still until
in later years they became fashionable
once more and I learned anew what
I always knew
that what I love, I love
whether it be poets or jazz or eggs
which are bad for you and then good for you again
which brings me back to that first poem
I ever wrote, in third grade
something about a bird on the walk or
birches bent by ice and, I image in all my pride,
a lesson about being true to my own heart 
and eating eggs any way.

© Jilly
March 26, 2017

 

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