I’d thought that they were extinct until
I found one in the coop,
A genuine Jersey Giant, strutting
Up on the henhouse roof,
Twice the size of the other hens
As I said to my sister, Faye,
‘Where did it come from?’ She replied,
‘Not there yesterday!’

‘I go to collect the eggs each day,
Do you think that could be missed?
That bird is a giant,’ she declared,
‘So don’t blame me, desist!’
I calmed her down, for she used to flare
At the slightest hint of crit.,
‘Whatever it is, it’s here to stay,
Perhaps we can breed from it?’

There wasn’t a cockerel near the size
Of this random Jersey Black,
‘It must have come visiting overnight,
I joked, ‘from a neighbour’s shack.’
She wandered into the henhouse and
From behind an empty keg,
She said, ‘You’d better come look at this,’
And showed me a giant egg.

An egg so big that you wouldn’t think
That a chicken could let it pass,
Tall and brown with a pointed crown
And a shell as thick as glass,
‘Are we going to let it hatch it out,’
Said Faye, ‘or crack it yet?
I wonder how many that would feed
As a giant omelette?’

‘We’ll leave her be, and we’ll wait and see
If a monster’s there inside,
We might as well, if a cockerel
It can be the henhouse pride.’
So we let her sit on the giant egg
For a week, or maybe more,
Then Faye came running inside one day,
‘You’ve not seen this before!’

The egg emitted a humming noise
And rocked a bit on its base,
While through the shell there were coloured lights
That would fade then grow apace,
And as we stood it began to crack
Then pieces would fall away,
It almost gave me a heart attack
For what I saw that day.

For spinning inside the egg we saw
A tiny universe,
With a sun-like star at the centre and
Our planets, in reverse,
And as we watched it began to grow
To float out the henhouse door,
Swelling constantly as it rose
To the skies, with a mighty roar.

I don’t know what it has done to us,
The sky doesn’t look the same,
There are three moons now in the evening sky
Since the Jersey rooster came,
I lopped the chicken that laid the egg
And I wait for the slightest sight,
With an axe for the Jersey cockerel
That Faye prays to at night.

David Lewis Paget