The Egg Or The Fish With Legs Dilemma Poem by Patti Masterman

I feel a curious recognition
When I happen to hear the sound of heartbeats
Magnified in a room, bouncing around the walls,
Amplified by microphone or boom-box;
Or a whooshing of water thru guttural pipes
Pumping rhythmically along the sluice gates.

The man in the next room is expounding on how
God is not like a human being; this much is really known,
He says, a self-improvised authority;
God has no wife, or children (delivered with sarcastic aplomb)

I wish that I could take him back again to the womb
Those nine months or so of suffusive silence
Counterpoint to the furious pounding of the maternal surf
Amid the watery rocking of the amniotic cradle;
And the thundering cacophony both night and day,
Of some overhead metronome, thumping away-

I doubt he could come, fresh from that egg primed hatchery
And declare that human beings are not like God.