Have you ever seen a boneless chicken? No? Well, neither have I, but that didn’t stop me from writing about one. Here’s how it happened:
One day I was in the supermarket shopping for something to cook for supper, and I came across a package of boneless chicken breasts in the meat department. I’d seen boneless chicken breasts many times before, but that day I asked myself some questions that I’d never asked before. The questions were: What about the rest of the chicken? Was that boneless too? Could the chicken walk? Could it fly? Where did it live? What did the other chickens think about it? What kind of egg does a boneless chicken lay?
I immediately took out my notebook and jotted all this down. Then I continued shopping and let the idea percolate. I decided to write a poem about a boneless chicken from the chicken’s point of view. I worked on the poem off and on for several weeks but had one problem: I couldn’t figure out how to end it. This happens a lot. When it does, I go on to something else, and eventually the ending comes to me, sometimes in my sleep, sometimes while I’m working on another poem, and sometimes at the most unexpected moment. That’s what happened here. I was having breakfast when that little lightbulb went on in my head. “Of course!” I said to myself. The eggs on my plate solved the ending of the poem for me. You’ll have to read the poem, “Ballad of a Boneless Chicken,” to see how I ended the poem. You’ll also know what kind of eggs I was having when I figured it out.
Ballad of a Boneless Chicken
I’m a basic boneless chicken,
yes, I have no bones inside,
I’m without a trace of rib cage,
yet I hold myself with pride,
other hens appear offended
by my total lack of bones,
they discuss me impolitely
in derogatory tones.
I am absolutely boneless,
I am boneless through and through,
I have neither neck nor thighbones,
and my back is boneless too,
and I haven’t got a wishbone,
not a bone within my breast,
so I rarely care to travel
from the comfort of my nest.
I have feathers fine and fluffy,
I have lovely little wings,
but I lack the superstructure
to support these splendid things.
Since a chicken finds it tricky
to parade on boneless legs,
I stick closely to the hen house,
laying little scrambled eggs.