Birds give it
to the forest floor
Cows let it fertilise next year’s grass
What we do with our shit
is important
My father told me
that in his village
in 1930s horse-and-cart rural northern England
they had earth closets
Moule’s Earth Closet
was invented in 1860
by the Reverend Henry Moule
He said flush toilets polluted God’s water
and wasted God’s precious resources
so in place of a cistern
he built a hopper
You pulled a handle when you were done
to send a portion of earth
or ashes onto your poo
A lot of people got the Moule Earth Closet
It was affordable
required no plumbing
didn’t pong like privies, cesspits,
rivers
and didn’t spread cholera
What we do with our shit
is important
When the under-seat bucket was full
you (or your servants)
would dig the
product
into the garden
If you had no garden
a person could come and collect it
to sell to farmers
My father, when he got old, just
dug a hole
down the paddock in next year’s vege plot,
squatted there each morning
under the sky
Maybe it was my mother’s idea—
to banish the smell of his movements
from the house, from the toilet he installed
when he did our plumbing
thirty years before
The septic tank he dug and lined with bricks
was a bit too small
It didn’t work very well
When it got out of control
he used a shovel
to empty it into his wheelbarrow
He’d take the stinking sludge away
and spread it under some trees
What we do with our shit
is important
Nowadays the Moule Earth Closet
only exists in museums
but when the plants are looking sad
in my inner-city home
and I have to go
to the garden centre
for another bottle of Bio-Feed
I wonder if I could get
a composting toilet,
and what I’d have to do
to make it work
Jackson 