Moving Sale

How came we by this quantity of junk?
A kind of shipwreck, washed up in the yard,
Glittering cheaply in the sun: the marred,
The obsolete, redundant.  We are sunk
Deep in things.  That hermit crab, the soul,
Crawled up tight into its borrowed shell,
Grows attached to where it has to dwell.
The world is furnished with the physical.
But one by one, the strangers lift away
What we have touched and worn, to curse and bless
Our things to a new life of usefulness,
And we, the sunlight spent, call it a day,
And rising up at last, feel rich and strange.
It is the weight and weightlessness of change.

© A. E. Stallings<—This poem first appeared in The Oxford American/i>