A Quiet Life

What a person desires in life
  is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
  the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
  banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
  and furnaces and factories,
  of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
  of women in kerchiefs and men with
  sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
  and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
  of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
  stations, towers, tanks.
And salt--a miracle of the first order,
  the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
  nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
  when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
  knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
  ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
  take it out on you, no dictators
  posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
  the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
  of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
  that came from nowhere.