Sarah Dickenson Snyder
The Elephant on the Earth
Over the aches of a planet
we are but a dusty second,
a shadowy group of foundations
just below the crust, easily sloughed.
This place is a sculpture—our touch
might wear down the surface
the way marble steps remember use
by smooth indentation. In the busy halls
of entanglements, we are the flies
a trunk or tail swats away—
it’ll move on, splashing river water
over itself, flushing the irritants,
swaying its immensity
through the catalogue of green.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder is the author of With a Polaroid Camera (Main Street Rag, 2019), The Human Contract (Kelsay Books, 2017) and Notes from a Nomad (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.
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