Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown They left us not a name to know them by.
They were the ones that in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers Of the city into the astonished sky.
They were the first great listeners, attuned To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world Leaving no memory but the marvelous Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breath we build our Babels of.
Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York.
He died of cancer at his home in University City,
Missouri on July 5th 1991.
