Generally, the knowledge we get from textbooks is that The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems in China, so many people think that the earliest poem should be the first one in the collection. In fact, there is an earlier written record of poetry. This poem is a two-word poem with only eight short words. This poem is called "Playing Songs", which is an ancient ballad in ancient times. This poem is recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu Yue, and also included in the Ancient Poetry Source of Qing Dynasty scholars.
The whole poem of "Playing Songs" is as follows:
Broken bamboo,
Bamboo;
Flying soil,
By killing.
This word "Mao" is the word "meat" in ancient Chinese characters.
The original intention of the poem is: to break bamboo-that is, to break bamboo, and to continue bamboo is to connect bamboo with leather or rope to make a bow and fly the soil, that is, to knead the soil into balls and kill (meat) one by one, that is, to hunt with the slingshot made.
It seems that this poem is the oldest recorded poem.