Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum

on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

—Archimedes

Maybe we should restrict investigations to that:
uncovering the fulcrum. The secret thingamabob

behind leverage. It helps me to imagine the globe
from high school American History. Miss Truex.

With the fulcrum and lever wedged underneath.
Eat your heart out, Archimedes. Hold my beer—

because isn’t the metaphoric fulcrum for saving
the Planet reducible to each of us wanting less?

I sing my favorite verse of “This Land Is Your
Land”: As I went walking I saw a sign there,

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me. “This Land
Is Your Land”. Okay, can I get an amen? (Amen.)

So you don’t like my choice of anthem? All right,
do you know The Delevantes? “The Junk Man”?

I’ll wait while you Google the song. Tick-tock.
That’s who knows thingamabobs: a junk man.

According to the song, he’s running the show.
He ought to be able to point us to a fulcrum.

Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize; as well as My Mother’s Red Ford: New & Selected Poems 1986 – 2020 published by Lost Horse Press. Poems have appeared in North American Review, december, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner among others. His latest is Beautiful Plenty (Main Street Rag, 2021).