A Moral Universe

You could also
believe that instead of the arc
bending toward justice, it falls into mud,
that there is no magnetic pull of goodness lingering
in the stars. How some of us will end in a nursing home,
alone, our minds washed of the stacks and stacks of scenes
we held in the folds. Or maybe there will be rebirth—
scientists have regenerated parts of dead pigs’
brains. I wonder what returns—The trough?
The suckling at a teat? The last touch
of dirt on those four tiny feet
before the slaughter?

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Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.