Have you ever eaten an elephant egg?
Scrambled with pieces of rattlesnake leg?
And served with a order of otter-beak sauce
With soup from the fin of a rhinoceros?
Cooking these eggs is a hard thing to do;
The biggest of boxcars can’t hold more than two.
For an elephant egg I would sell my old truck!
But in finding this egg I have run out of luck.
I searched all the day and then looked some more
They laughed me out of the grocery store.
Elephant eggs are as strange and as rare
As feathers all over the back of a bear
Or ducks with trunks instead of their bills
They’re nearly as scarce as buffalo gills
Or platypus teeth or ladybug tails
Or kangaroo horns or antelope scales.
I searched in the deserts, I traveled the seas;
In the strangest of places I fell to my knees.
For directions to find them I’d cry and I’d beg
But no one could show me an elephant egg.
Until in the jungle of Quintana Roo,
I met an old woman who said what to do:
“A chicken’s egg omelette is something to taste,
But searching for elephant eggs is a waste.”
I took her advice and I went to the store,
I picked up ten dozen and then picked up more.
To break them and whip them took oodles of work;
There were so many eggs that I used a hay fork.
I fed my whole village one omelette that day,
And over the chatter I heard a child say,
“If I am a girl and my name is still Meg,
I’m certain we’ve eaten an elephant egg!”