Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

As a child 

I ate mud. 

It tasted of grit and peat 

and wild churning 

and something I could never find 

a name for. 

Later I became 

a moongazer 

always squinting through 

windows, 

believing freedom 

was aerial 

until I figured that the moon 

was a likely mud-gazer 

longing for the thick sludge 

of gravity, 

the promiscuous thrill 

of touch, 

the licence to make, 

break, remake, 

and so I uncovered 

the old role of poets – 

to be messengers 

between moon and mud – 

and began to learn the many 

languages of earth 

that have nothing to do with nations 

and atlases 

and everything to do 

with the ways 

of earwigs, 

the pilgrim trail of roots 

and the great longing of life to hold 

and be held, 

and the irrepressible human love 

of naming: 

ooze, mire, manure, humus, dirt, silt 

mould, loam, soil, slush, clay, shit, 

mannu, matope, barro, 

tin, ni, luto, fango… 

All have their place, I found, 

in the democracy of tongues, 

none superior, 

none untranslatable, 

all reminders 

of the anthem 

of muck 

of which we are made, 

except when June clouds capsize 

over an Arabian Sea 

and a sleeping city 

awakens to an ache so singular 

that just for a moment, 

it could have no name 

other than that 

where sound meets scent 

and a slurry of matter 

meets a slick lunatic wetness: 

mitti. 

Just that. Nothing else will do.