Each egg is a long story. Refilled buckets, feed and water,
maintained roof and three tin walls, excrement in the stalls,
hay floor pens, and them, that upright gathering,
clean taupe brown and red speckled.

A farmer can tell a young bird in her first few cycles just by the dented,
stunted, oblong shape of a typically light cream almost snow white colored egg.

The health of the goat can be smelled lingering around the wealth of her udders,
enough milk and milking to make the beginners hands shudder,
taste the changing days, warming her bloated belly in the burgeoning sun,
the torn green grass and severed flesh tanned hay,
the sweet, yellow kernel dotted feed they clamor,
bellow, knocking sisters over.

The farmer lives by the first and most essential rule of writing.
Your characters are alive. Your labor suffers and hungers same as you.

For all the nuances and imbalances of your work to read,
each one must breathe, bleed, breed, heed you,
dominant call and still muster up height, courage to challenge,
search out and discover that dip below the fence,
the one section where a farmer failed to measure the top wire,
so it hangs low.

Anticipate the protrusion of some familiar mediocre star
mounting the curved unsuspecting hips of a dry horizon.
Crow for it. At it. Beating wings and cotton throat sings
every outbreak of day.

Give thanks and praise
that these planetary bodies once fucked,
and made way for yet another growing season.
Another day. Another reason to crow.

Like a farmer, plant the seeds of what you want to eat.
And like a writer, watch the stories grow.