Dog days

The Scrap Paper

The gods scrawled
a few lines on waste paper
just to shake up dried ink,
then hurled the scrap
down to Earth—
since it is inside a trash can—
and moved on
without a second doubt.

Meanwhile, down here,
upon discovery—
as humans generally do— we took the lines to be
some ancient code.

we spent decades upon decades
in search of its meaning,

and of course,
there were fights, too,
among the sects of people
who held different interpretations
of the ‘text’.

No one really seemed to know
what the lines actually meant,
so the path was simple— choose a side
and reframe your words
as those of gods.

Nevertheless, unbeknownst to our

creators,
we continue our little tradition
in our little corner
of the ever-moving universe—
or a junkyard,
for that matter.