Erasure poems are made by whittling other poems down, to see if another poem lives inside the original. This is from “Postcards from the Volcano,” by Wallace Stevens:
Children picking our bones,
Quick as foxes on the hill.
The grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell…
With our bones
We left much more, left what still is–
The look of things, left what we felt, what we saw.
The spring clouds blow
Beyond our gate and the windy sky…
Still, weaving budded aureoles
Will speak our speech and never know.
A tatter of shadows peaked to white
gold of the opulent sun.
