Dust to Dust by Alice Major

A film of silver on the bookshelf,
fluffs of disaggregated substance
on the baseboards. Much of it is me—
I’m shedding
seven million flakes of skin a minute,
a whole outer layer of myself
day by day. There’s just so much dust
to dust. And it isn’t only me.

We’re heading
gravewards faster than we think.
Seven billion people on the planet, plus
our dogs and cats, our cows, the pollen
from our mutated crops—and then
all that desiccated soil blown in
from desertified territories.
A webbing
of soot and off-scourings, a scurf
that settles into every crevice, accretes
beyond the reach of rags and cleanser.
Dust to dust. The round world’s winding sheet.

From: https://poems.com/poem/dust-to-dust/

Date: 2018

By: Alice Major (1949- )