First Grade Homework
By D. Nurkse
The child’s assignment:
“What is a city?”
All dusk she sucks her pencil
while cars swish by
like ghosts, neighbors’ radios
forecast rain, high clouds,
diminishing winds: at last
she writes: “The city is everyone.”
Now it’s time
for math, borrowing and exchanging,
the long discipleship
to zero, the stranger,
the force that makes us
what we study: father and child,
writing in separate books,
infinite and alone.
Copyright Credit: D. Nurkse, “First Grade Homework” from The Rules of Paradise (New York: Four Way Books, 2001). Used by permission of Four Way Books.
Source: Poetry (August 1990)