by J.D. Smith
Someone may have wondered
How much does a mountain weigh?
There was no great balance to set it on,
no human scale, but the question
could be divided, layers taken and tallied
with rounding of inevitable error.
Perhaps the only way to pay for this answer
was to sell off the resulting heaps
of shorn stone and dust,
which some believed
would lighten, if not the earth,
our passage over it.
J.D. Smith’s third collection, Labor Day at Venice Beach,
will be published later this year, as will his first humor collection,
Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth. His poems have appeared in journals
and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.