Despite the recent news media chatter about a "fiscal cliff," the event that we can't (and mustn't) stop thinking about is the December 14 massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This draws me to a poem by Joan Mazza (whose poem "Digits" was featured earlier this week on New Year's Day); this new poem deals with the geometry of eggs and of bullets. Please think of gun control.
Geometry Lesson by Joan Mazza
In my old white enameled pot
I place seven fresh eggs,
cover with water.
Jiggle a little and they settle
point up, one in the center,
six circle around it.
My ex-husband showed me
this arrangement, rotated
the oiled metal cylinder,
explained why a revolver
always has six bullets.
"Geometry Lesson" was previously published online in Wazee Journal; it was the Second Place winner in the contest for the Karma Dean Ogden Memorial Prize, Poetry Society of Virginia, 2009; and it appears on magnets on cars for The Living Poetry Project, 2012.
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