Egg - Happy Mother's Day

When she was about 2, my precocious daughter was riding with me in the car when she said, "Daddy, sky is blue."
"Yep," I replied.
"Why?"
I said, "Well, you've seen a prism that breaks light into colors like a rainbow?"
"Yes," she said.
"Well, when sunlight comes through the atmosphere, it works kind of like a prism, but it just breaks off the blue color from the sunlight. So, the sky looks blue."
She was quiet, digesting this. Finally, she said, "No. God made it."
"Well, that too."

I wish I had written this poem and know that C. G. Hanzlicek was writing for all of us with inquisitive children - which is to say, all of us who have had children. This is for Sandi, the wondrous mother of my children who kept me from more parenting mistakes than a therapist could ever hope to keep track of.

Egg
C.G. Hanzlicek

I'm scrambling an egg for my daughter.
"Why are you always whistling?" she asks.
"Because I'm happy."
And it's true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn't
Have seen it as my future.
It's partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I've come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we're told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn't confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here's your egg.

****
Happy Mother's Day.