>Joseph Campbell in "The Power of Myth", talks of that pygmy legend of the
>little boy who finds the bird with the beautiful song in the forest and
>brings it home.
>
>He asks his father to bring food for the bird, and the father doesn't want
>to feed a mere bird, so he kills it. And the legend says the man killed the
>bird, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song, himself. He
>dropped dead, completely dead, and was dead forever.
>
>It seems to me this story is about what happens when human beings destroy
>their environment. As Joseph Campbell said, "...they destroy their own
>nature, too. They kill the song."
This reminded me of a favorite poem by Maxine Kumin.
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.
from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (1982)
jt
>
>Pardon any cross-posting
>
>Best regards,
>Lynda Roberts
>http://www.artecology.org
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