Waste, Land

By Elizabeth Carmichael

Now is the time we find out what we’re made of.
We have felt oil in the air for months but
imagined once the weather turned
we could wash it out—

and so we learn what stains.
Now locked out of the lab we must experiment
on our own conclusions: follow orders,
pull the levers, look away

(or do we jump ourselves?).
What will we become, with no respite
our hearts may turn to Sisyphus,
breaking every day,

only to be repaired again with the same twine.
Now is the time we learn if we face into the wind
or circle around and make our backs
curve into a shell and stay inside.

Stand tall, or disrupt the arrow’s trajectory?

Elizabeth Carmichael refutes biography as a form of identification. She is well-educated, well-read and well-travelled for an American. She was published, not recently, in The Cranbrook Review

“Heart and Arrow” by Scott Gressitt.