by Natalie Wilkinson
I.
Today I learned that the same chicks I chased down and held struggling
would calmly eat out of my hand and stand on it of their own free will.
This reinforced my loosely held belief that knowledge is merely the application of accidental discoveries.
And, had I made this discovery earlier in my life,
applying it
to my relationships with people,
it may have changed the entire trajectory of my life.
II.
The rooster crows.
He wakes us up at four a.m. We would rather be sleeping.
And yet,
on the forgiving side of the equation,
I have seen our rooster in the rain, sheltering a hen and her chicks under his wing.
I have seen him chase a fox from one end of the yard to another.
I daresay he was tired of losing his people to her.
I was.
I have seen him watch the skies for hawks and sound the alarm.
I have seen him offer food to his hens,
abstaining.
These activities incline me to admiration, although I know from painful experience that a good rooster is hard to find.
III.
A hen will sit on her eggs and others’. She rolls them around underneath her warm body and hisses when approached,
for three weeks.
How she manages to eat or drink, I do not know.
A secret.
Her devotion should be legendary.
Newly hatched chicks huddle under her for warmth. She takes them with her around the yard,
teaching.
They sleep snuggly under her puffed-out feathers until they can perch high off the ground with the others.
IV.
Eggs.
Of the dozen laid in a nest, half will hatch, one-sixth will not complete their entry into the world, and the rest will be abandoned.
Chicks magically appear inside the lightly delineated line between clear slime and thick yellow.
It is a mystery how they force their way into that aperture-free shell, fragile and inaccessible.
The spherical question of whether the chicken or the egg came first is stuffed inside the smooth oval with them.
When ready, they can peck their way out of any
riddles
life might hold.
The universe spirals around this enigma. It, like eggs, is not circular.
photo credit: Michael Anfang, Unsplash