Empty Pitchforks

“There was poverty before money.”

There was debtors’ prison before inmates,

there was hunger prefossil,

there was pain before a nervous system

to convey it to the brain, there existed

poverty before intelligence, or accountants,

before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl

in nowhere, it was palpable

where nothing was palpable, there was repossession

in the gasses forming so many billion ... ;

there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling

ash, in marl, and coming loam,

thirst in the few strands of hay slipping

between a pitchfork’s wide tines,

in the reptile and the first birds,

poverty aloof and no mystery like God

its maker; there was surely want

in one steamed and sagging onion,

there was poverty in the shard of bread

sopped in the final drop of gravy

you snatched from your brother’s mouth.

Source: New and Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)