Aquinas and the Cosmic Dumpster

Aquinas and the Cosmic Dumpster

Karen An-hwei Lee

Aquinas, we’re face to face with a floating dumpster
on fire in outer space, a metaphysical extrapolation
of the earthly dumpster where our little journals
end up one day, smythe-sewn, saddle-stitched.

What did you see in your heavenly revelation
causing you to feel your beloved Summa
Theologiae was no more than straw? Why
did those visions make your writing like straw?

How about the pages of grass bathed in starlight,
a lawn or meadow shining without burning
in a pearled, nocturnal pathway of lunar shine,
the unwritten books in the black oak forest?

Silver-haired Barbara murmurs, those journals
where your little poems appear, hand-picked
like prized apples, no one wants them—
neither libraries nor bookstores, nobody

wants this review or that quarterly. I imagine
Aquinas hugging his books at a dumpster—
a blasting celestial furnace—all I have written
seems like straw—a flammable field of grass

compared to what has been revealed to me.
The inexorable, cosmic dumpster sings
of dust to saddest ash, the mortal nature
of saints, satellites, and Aquinas alike.

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Karen An-hwei Lee
Poet & Academic

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of six poetry collections, including The Beautiful Immunity (2024, Tupelo) and Duress (2022, Poiema/Cascade). She is Provost and Professor of English at Wheaton College.

Photography by Osmany Mederos