MAY 2007
by Robert Lowes
Living from one cracked egg in the frying pan
to another, one peeled orange to another,
I finger my way along a rosary strand
of chores and mutter, “Don’t forsake me, Father,”
as the toaster inwardly reddens with fine rage
and the garbage grinder roars for the newly damned.
I flip first thing to the obituary page
of the morning paper, news I understand,
because everyone is eulogized by a job:
forty years of selling spoons, stages
where the tenor sang, the therapist milking sobs
on schedule, public wars the colonel waged.
Write down that I served breakfast to a girl
who asked me for a sunny-sided world.
Robert Lowes, a journalist at a physicians’ magazine called Medical Economics, has cooked many an egg for his wife and three children. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Christian Century, and Tampa Review, among other publications.
