October 14: Wedding Anniversary, Maxine Kumin, "The Excrement Poem"

It is my nineteenth wedding anniversary today.  My wife and I haven't had a lot of time to spend together today, what with work and school and dance classes and stuff.

However, I've been thinking a lot about everything that we've been through in the last two decades.  Lots and lots of good times.  Lots and lots of shit.  And we have survived in the face of a lot of storms.

Maxine Kumin is the poet of the week, and she has a poem I love.  It's about shit, and it's about survival.  I love this poem because it reminds me that there's beauty in everything, including the darkest of times.

Saint Marty and his wife go on.

The Excrement Poem

by:  Maxine Kumin

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinous mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrowful,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.