Who can remember back to the first poets, <br />The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? <br />No one has remembered that far back <br />Or now considers, among the artifacts, <br />And bones and cantilevered inference <br />The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, <br />So lofty and disdainful of renown <br />They left us not a name to know them by. <br /> <br />They were the ones that in whatever tongue <br />Worded the world, that were the first to say <br />Star, water, stone, that said the visible <br />And made it bring invisibles to view <br />In wind and time and change, and in the mind <br />Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world <br />And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers <br />Of the city into the astonished sky. <br /> <br />They were the first great listeners, attuned <br />To interval, relationship, and scale, <br />The first to say above, beneath, beyond, <br />Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, <br />Who having uttered vanished from the world <br />Leaving no memory but the marvelous <br />Magical elements, the breathing shapes <br />And stops of breath we build our Babels of.<br /><br />Howard Nemerov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-makers/
