Why Liturgist of the Land

A Single Work Completed

Does anyone experience a single work completed? A work done so perfectly that nothing more needs to be added or taken away.

In my recent lyric essay “Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed,” the entire meditation turns on four actions. They form the simplest structure of labor I have ever seen.

Dig.
Dump.
Bury.
Cover.

Nothing decorative. Nothing symbolic. Everything necessary.

The essay follows this structure through several scenes: a burial imagined with a gravedigger and a cigar, a deep fish pit dug with a friend along Lake Independence in Michigan, and the recognition that sacred ground forms wherever human hands complete the work placed before them. Sometimes the people doing that work would never call themselves priests. They would not name their labor a ritual. Yet the land knows.

The piece explores how these small acts reveal something older than ceremony and older than language. A grammar of the earth. A covenant between human labor and the soil beneath our feet.

Liturgist of the Land here

Read the essay at Flash the Court →
https://flashthecourt.com/2026/03/06/liturgist-of-the-land-a-single-work-completed-by-gregory-ormson/