Art

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

August 30, 2020

This is a heart warming story by Seoul’s acclaimed author, Sun-Mi Kwang about an egg-laying chicken self-named Sprout who when she could no longer lay eggs, was to be culled by the farmer and used to boil chicken soup. All her life her eggs were taken away from her as soon as she laid them. Sprout wanted so much to be a mother, just once to hatch her own egg and watch her baby come out of the cracked shell. Then she could die. But how?  

Sprout decide to fly the coop. It was dangerous to be out in the open field outside the farm. There was a weasel that preyed on the farm chickens. But it mattered not to her. She was going to be killed anyway. Sprout had to take this last chance to make her dream come true.  

She met Straggler, a drake whose beautiful companion, a white duck had while Straggler was away for a short while, died at the hands of the weasel. The white duck had sacrificed her life to protect her egg in the nest. Now there was no mother to hatch the egg.  

And hatched she did! Nobody could possibly know how happy she’d been when she sat on the egg. The baby duck she named Greentop. The rest of the story unfolds in such a beautiful way that this is a must-read book.  

The most touching moment was when Sprout let Greentop go soaring into the sky with his kind.