~ for Beth Vincelette In a world heading toward predicted ruin, remember how there are still things that begin— Green shoots pushing through the paper tent of a garlic bulb; tubers that thrive after the final frosts of January, eyes open in the sustaining dark. And every day, an egg from the hen house: grey or speckled brown, white haloed with blue, ivory streaked with olive as it passes through the oviduct . Whether your life is the size of a humming- bird egg or the Madagascan elephant bird egg, its sphere cradles its own kind of depth. Don't we who have mothered know what it feels to die a thousand deaths and return from the brink? Praise, then, the roundness of every new beginning. Praise what holds a tiny world in, a sky not yet cracked on the edge of a pan or fallen.