The Excrement Poem [Warning! this poem contains the Shit word]

I (Greg) am currently taking a British literature class (or ‘Brit Lit’ if you are in to that sort of thing… I am not…). For the most part I struggle interpreting poetry and literature beyond a literal meaning, perhaps this is why I am a History Major. I really like the naturalist ideas expressed in Romantic poetry, Victorian writing is beyond me, and modernism tries too hard sometimes… but I read a poem in class the other day that made me like Modernism a little more, it is entitled The Excrement Poem. This is the type of poem that I could see myself writing, I hope all enjoy!

P.S. I am sure there is some deep level meaning contained herein, but I am shallow and just think poop is hilarious! (I still haven’t moved beyond third grade in that sense)

The Excrement Poem

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

Coprinus 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.