Spring 2015
Candling the Eggs by Wally Swist
It was the candled egg
that I remember that Mrs. Dornisch
held up to the flame, and its total eclipse
the darkness softening
the harshness of my father’s wrathful
temper when mother would walk me over
against the darkness
of the cellar of her farmhouse,
suffused with the odor of the hens, that
there, next door, during
the times his rage breached
the level of reason. My father who never
floated as feathers do in the air.
Always feel safe here, she said,
and I always did, with her by my side,
missed a day at the factory,
but who could only speak
broken English, was ridiculed at work,
her aproned warmth
distinguished by the cookies
she stuffed into her pockets, her momentary
then vent verbal fury
at the injustices; while Mrs. Dornisch,
a septuagenarian, and myself, aged three,
musing uttered in sotto voce,
deepening the privacy of our candling
the eggs, the condensation on the walls
candled the eggs,
as two anchorites might have
applied gilt to the letters in an illuminated
evoking what mother
told me in a story about what
the catacombs looked like, so that the time
manuscript, bound
in vellum; and as our breaths
steamed in the coolness of the cellar, one
I spent in Mrs. Dornisch’s cellar
with her became my first spiritual
experience, the quiet there so superb that
at a time, the eggs
would be added to
the coiled metal basket, clicking against
I recall whenever I had
a thought Mrs. Dornisch could
hear it. The quiet and the candlelight amid
the top of some
of the others, as a golden
halo flickered in the hallowed darkness.
Photo: Bellewstown, Co. Meath 2014
The Linnet's Wings Poetry