sara Etgen-Baker Poet Personification

Notes About The Poem

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Overlooked Things

Beneath the piano,
a dust ball rehearses eternity.
It gathers what time discards~
the wool of vanished winters,
pollen from orchards no longer blooming,
one white hair from the head
of a woman who has forgotten
the song she once sang
while washing dishes.

Thread by thread,
it constructs its small republic
of neglect.

The blue fiber from a child's mitten
lies beside ash from a birthday candle.
A fragment of feather
touches the husk of a seed
carried indoors on a boot sole
years ago.

Nothing enters by design.
The dust ball accepts all arrivals,
offering citizenship equally
to the celebrated and the overlooked.

A scrap of ribbon.
A grain of soil.

The curled filament
from a lamp long shattered.

Under magnification,
its tangled construction
resembles aerial photographs
of rivers branching through continents,
or the dark filaments
between galaxies.

I suspect
the universe favors this method~
gathering,
combining,
keeping.

Meanwhile the piano above it
waits in silence.
No hand touches the keys.
Yet the dust ball continues
its patient composition,
assembling notes of absence,
measures of departure,
a symphony written
in particles.

Perhaps every house
creates one secret historian.

Not in attics.
Not in albums.
But beneath chairs,
under beds,
behind bookcases,
where unnoticed years
settle into a sphere.

When sunlight finds it,
the dust ball briefly kindles.
Each mote shines
with borrowed radiance.

Then the light shifts,
returning to is quiet labor,
collecting the shed signatures
of ordinary existence,
rehearsing eternity
one particle at a time.

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