Ninety-nine percent of poems are garbage, he said into the microphone: a metallic verdict meant to shape clay hearts. Poems should soar, their feathered edges full and dark, their melodies issuing through ancient forests with quiet, clarion beauty. Well, I cannot even sketch a bird, let alone fashion one from syllables and stops. All I can draw is an earthworm, a squiggle with rounded edges and rings. But a worm is God’s work first, a revelation. And who’s to say that peristalsis is less miraculous than flight? A worm is eyeless but not blinded it writhes on the ground with vision— not as Polyphemus, with a hubris wound, but through the very saliva-sodden humus that heals. It is a creature of the soil, a garbage-eater whose waste is food. Taking in rot so trees can take root, breathing air into the earth like God into adam. Where is the bird without the worm? When the waters of divine visitation draw it to the surface, its consumption is the bird’s communion: manna, bread and wine. So write your garbage poem, gather dropped leaves and overripe fruit and turn them over and over in the heat of prayer. And so fill the world with birdsong, with sky-sized meaning tethered to the wriggling earth.
So beautiful.
Love, love, love this!