The prompt for today’s poem came from a suggestion to find a specialized dictionary and combine parts from ten or so entries.  I thought immediately of my Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a book I gleaned from among some cast off free books.  This little gem uncovers all sorts of word mysteries, fable sources, idioms, phrases.  I poked about until I came across a whole page of entries concerning eggs – how could I resist.  The result, a silly Sunday afternoon sort of poem, nothing to ruffle anyone’s feathers, I promise.

Egg Phrases

I read somewhere that there is reason
in roasting eggs even if I have eggs on the spit
because well, eggs is eggs: duck’s egg, golden
eggs, scrabbled eggs, mundane eggs and
curate’s eggs, who surely said, the Curate
that is, crush in the egg instead of ‘nip in the bud’,
because he was a tight man not a show him
an egg and instantly the whole air is full
of feathers sort of man – not a wit of
risk in him. You had to egg ‘em on and
tread on egg shells around him, but
a kindly Egg-Headed man who took eggs
for money even when he could see
them coming at him with an egg-trot gait,
balancing a stack past their eyes…

But they would be the ones left there standing
egg on their faces because surely all those
eggs wouldn’t have fit into just one basket.

© 2016 – Laurel Archer

italics indicate phrases used from the dictionary, everything else is con-egg-tion work.