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| Kill the old Red Rooster |
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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.
