Dividing one makes two,
and so on. But dividing zero?
“Nothing can come of nothing,”
Lear laments—and yet, as you

know, God’s signature’s here.
Where zero was, is one, then two:
two lights, moon and sun;
then man and woman;

two brothers, two kingdoms—
then one, one stump, one shoot,
a branch bowed down with fruit.
So where zero becomes one,

two, then many, many again
are one in whom “neither slave
nor free, male nor female”:
a new nation, ex nihilo.