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# The Excrement Poem
- URL: https://poetry101.love/the-excrement-poem/
- Published: 2026-02-08T01:26:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-02-08T01:31:49.000Z
- Description: by Maxine Kumin
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Maxine Kumin, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

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 barrow-full,  
I honor shit for saying: We go on.

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Kumin, Maxine. [The retrieval system: poems](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The%5FRetrieval%5FSystem/qwlbAAAAMAAJ?ref=poetry101.love). New York, Viking, 1978.