20^th century American poet Ronald Johnson composed this concrete poem during a year spent walking the English countryside.  It was published in his 1970 collection Songs of the Earth and appears again in the "Foundations" section of his epic poem ARK. 
 
Concrete poems confront readers with initial discomfort, then calm them into contemplation.  Frustrating ingrained habits of scanning text, concrete poetry submerges sense in merged words and forces a practice of slow reading. 
 
Presented with Johnson's poem, most readers initially parse it as "earth-earth-earth" repeated six times.   Eventually though, familiarity breeds content. Look closely and loosely cloaked words emerge from within [the] earth: ear, art, hear, heart, hearth, a, and the.
 
The work functions according to a combinatoric logic.  Just as the same letters can yield many words, the same words can produce myriad meanings.  Syntactically shifting ground opens new semantic horizons. Puzzled decoding transforms into rapid-fire sense-making: playing around with the words earth, ear, art, hear, heart, hearth sparks an array of associative lines of thought and thematic interpretations.  I prefer not to preempt your hermeneutic process by providing examples.  Suffice to say, this puny poem packs a plethora of purport!
 
Johnson's concrete poem embodies a geo-poetry, an earth-work made of words where sedimented letters sing sentiments in sign-strings whose semantic signals surface slowly, surely, and suddenly.  Written lines become graphic strata composing a stratigraphy to be studied strategically.  Simultaneously, unearthing this site's layered significance requires no expert qualifications.  All willing readers possess the poetic license necessary to access this matrix of signifiers and set free the meanings suspended in its structure. 
 
Johnson's poem, homely in its simplicity, reduces language to its basic elements, bringing it back to earth.  There is a kind of "voluntary regression"[1] in Johnson's craft—a breaking down and cracking up of his medium, to render it more proximate to inhuman materials.  Letters, reduced to matter, matter more; concrete poems inscribe the letter of their own laws.
 
Italo Calvino concluded the last essay he wrote with this invitation: "Think what it would be like … to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…" (Six Memos 124).  As if trying to let the earth sing its proper song, Johnson pushes language past propriety into a post-proprietary planetary poetics.