The Poem

Ink and pencil
Write all the verses
Of the world.

What monsters exist
Swimming in the black
And fecund well?

What others glide
Freeing the carbon
From their bones?

How can the live being
Which is a poem.
An organism

With blood and breath,
Be born
From dead seed?

The paper
Is not always as white
As the first morning.

It is often
The sad and impoverished paper
for wrapping parcels.

Other times it is
Of the airmail letter,
Light as cloud.

But it is from paper,
The white aseptic,
That the poem explodes.

How can a live being
Be born
From a mineral soil?