George Moore
Lesson in Concrete Poetics
for João Cabral de Melo Neto
The first poem of all time was a city
lines merging in letters and lives
streets with sewers surely but also
skyscrapers and undergrounds
neighborhoods tumbling off the tongue
not well translated from Hebrew or Sumerian
or in the aim of an automatic
or the hunger it involves
But the poem grew stronger by bloodlines
and some wild innovation
and had an unnamed child
in the sun-baked ruin of an adobe house
and for centuries the poem survived
in the great bellied into a single word
an ordinary flower
the magic center a city resurrecting
the thread of a song
and everyone singing