Ancient Music

by Gerald Locklin

“Some people come here to sit and think;
I just come to shit and stink.”

How often we have read that
On a shithouse wall.

To me it is perennial philosophy,
The psalm of life:
It’s one of those eternal verities
Of which William Faulkner waxed so eloquently,
Accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature.

I bet it antedates Homer,
Although it might not rhyme as perfectly
In Greek,

Which goes to show why English is
The most poetic of languages.