“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.
