What

(they've known all along)

What

if each of the world's 6 billion people 
wrote one poem today 
on a single folded sheet 
and stapled it each to the others 
end on end. The paper chain would reach 
around the world twenty-one 
thousand times. Earth, the tenement, 
with six billion poems flapping 
like bedsheets in the air 
above our streets, some blood 
marked, some greyed 
by the smoke from our frankfurter 
stands, most white 
like belly feathers and we all 
have to look up. Is it time 
to cut the poetry loose? The news 
papers cry and the people 
pull out their scissors. 

The poems launch themselves 
upward, it takes only half of them 
to link humanity to the moon, the rest 
carry on past, we watch 
with our telescopes 
and iphones until they are gone. 
Well that's that then isn't it, 
the poets of the world 
might say. They've known all along, 
about the numbers -

---

We hear this kind of calculation used everywhere today: If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would circle the earth. If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 1994 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth. Every day, Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York and back again. (Not a bad idea, if you put a bullet train in that pipe.) This poem uses the same conceit, but for poetic purposes, making a paper chain of poems strung like a clothesline above the tenement of the earth. It's a poem about poetry, but also about humanity and art, struck through with humour, and ending with a nod to reality. 

Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux

IBPC New Poetry Voices
First Place, February 2010
Judges Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux