Billy Collins has a wonderful thing for introductions to poetry. Of course, there’s his famous one, called “Introduction to Poetry.” In fact, when my wife and I first met, before we were dating, I got her to read it out loud to a breakroom full of coworkers. Over the years, I’ve sent that poem to any of a hundred people who “don’t like poetry,” who prefer the “Tell me what you mean and make it quick” approach to language. (I can also sic Nadezhda Mandelstam on them if it’s required.)

Anyway, I’m never sure about the copyright rules when posting whole poems online from a book I have in hand, and usually only do so when I can find them somewhere else on the internet. I’m also not sure if Google Books counts. So if this link works, Billy Collins has a new one that made me smile, called “BC/AD.”

Here’s the second half of it:

I drew a long horizontal line on the board
to represent all of human time,
then a vertical line intersecting it at the birth of Christ,
and I added a stick figure of Plato standing
on the line and a small zero off to the side.

“You see,” I announced, “Plato was born
428 years before the birth of Christ."

“But how did they know that?” she asked.

“Excellent question,” I replied, shaking my head.

Then from the back, another excellent one:
“And why do the languages change from English to Latin,
from ‘before Christ’ to ‘Anno Domini.
You would think it would be the other way around."

“You would think,” I repeated,
moving over to the big school window,
one finger pressed pensively to my lips,
to observe the orange and yellow trees,
patches of blue beyond them,
and a few ordinary birds darting through the scene,

until the bell, signaling the end of our class
and the beginning of something else, rang.

This was, after all, an introduction to poetry.