Dig
A poem by Ernest Hilbert
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You’ll dig your hole with teaspoons, thimbles, pins. Get started soon. It’s going to take a while. You get an inch and then the rain begins. You dig a year and make a tiny pile. At least the music’s pretty good. It ends When digging stops. You want to dance, but then It’s silence all around, and that just sends You back to dig the endless earth again. The hole is big enough to hold your foot. You take a break. You’ve done enough. It’s earned. Or so you hope. You wonder where you put The pin. The rain is gone. The sun has burned Your face, then clouds, and then cold rain again. You free a worm. You pull it out and throw It in the pile. It wriggles in, and when You look again, it’s gone where you will go, Beneath the heavy world you learned to love, To join the ones who dug before, those who, With care, taught you to dig while here above, As if it’s all you’re really born to do.
Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize.
Order the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.