A Transcendentalist at Large

“There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.”

    —Ralph Waldo Emerson

A pile of dog crap

near the downtown Bread of Life Mission

draws a slow congress

of green/bronze flies—so many

you think maybe you see emerald bits

of broken glass from a broken wine bottle—

someone should sweep it up.

But when you stop to look closer—

you look twice—it crawls

to life there, on that busy sidewalk,

the bright sunlight and the hungry flies

making that shit shine like a jewel.