All That Remains of Us

...is poo(p).

The swallows have left - so early. I saw just one today, zipping around as if in a panic - missed the flight, oh no! I guess it will hook up with some other stragglers.
The log shed will bear witness to their presence for a while.

If shit seems an odd thing to honour, how about 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.


And, quite by chance today, I came upon this very interesting article about how faecal transplants can cure a number of serious medical conditions which defy drug treatment.