“God!” the second-year student whines,
“They claim to love the environment,
but they don’t even recycle!”
In his third year he may take
Foundations of Western Philosophy
and contemplate the nature of his pique,
welcome himself, in Themes of Western History,
to Sixteenth Century London, Twelfth Century Rome,
First Century Jerusalem.
But if he fails to recycle the scraps—as he will—
the printed pages, the vellum palimpsests,
the speculative papyri of these stories,
he might as well toss that Snicker’s wrapper he’s holding
right there on the mall on his way to his midterm exam
in Intro to Ecology and his un-memorable blue book.
To do the right thing right, it is sensible first to wonder why.