Mag 39 and a Late Poetry Wednesday

Kill the old Red Rooster

My father in the closing days of World War II had read a popular book of the times about existing and thriving on an acre of land. He bought two and begun a house that in my memory never seemed done. We had a "truck garden" on half an acre and raised all our own vegetables and sold some too. And he raised and field trained Beagles and Irish Setters, and because of the training hunted for rabbits and all manners of birds. And Mom raised chickens and sold eggs. I was trained in egg gathering before school. God, how I hate chickens!

Kill That Old Red Rooster

Chickens little peeping in my skirts

Chicken shit on the bottoms of my feet

Egg snakes trapped in the fence

That big red rooster stalking me in the coop

Gathering eggs on a damp Missouri morning.

Eggs hatching in the incubator

Fluffy yellow chicks for Easter

Fried chicken for dinner

Scrambled eggs for breakfast

Hiding broken eggs that fell from the basket

I had swung at Rooster Red.

Washing eggs clean of chicken shit

Putting them gently in cartoons to deliver in the wagon

Dipping beheaded chickens in boiling water

Getting plucked feathers all over my face

Up my nose and all over my clothes.

The smell of warm blood and wet feathers

The squawk of the hens and the thud of the axe

Echoing in my dreams with the slithering egg snakes

On butchering day

But smiling that at last

That ole Red Rooster was gone.

J. Binford-Bell 2010

On blogger Magpie Tales has a weekly writing challenge. It is always nice to stretch our wings. Magpie Tales posts a visual or written prompt every week that a host of bloggers take up and develop into short tales and poems. This week the prompt was the picture of the Rooster above. I encourage my readers to go to the link above and read some of other entries linked there.