Beginning
By Lia Purpura
In the beginning,
in the list of begats,
one begat
got forgot:
work begets work
(one poem
bears
the next).
In other words,
once there was air,
a bird
could be got.
Not taken.
Not kept.
But conjured up.
Copyright Credit: Lia Purpura, "Beginning" from It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful. Copyright © 2015 by Lia Purpura. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source: It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin Books, 2015)