Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "The city is everyone."

Rebel Girl is still on the lookout for the ideal Valentine's Day poem but until then here is another about teaching, learning, writing, being.

A poem by D. Nurske, from his book The Rules of Paradise.

This first appeared in the August 1990 issue of Poetry.

First Grade Homework

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.