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The woods is white with snow. The shy birds come and go Between feeder and trees. Titmice and chickadees By right of flight survive, I by the heavy stove.
The Lords of War sell the earth to buy fire, they sell the water and air of life to buy fire. They are little men grown great by willingness to drive whatever exists into its perfect absence. Their intention to destroy any place is solidly founded upon their willingness to destroy every place. Every household
The little stream sings in the crease of the hill. It is the water of life. It knows nothing of death, nothing. And this is the morning of Christ’s resurrection. The tomb is empty. There is no death. Death is our illusion, our wish to belong only to ourselves, which is our freedom to kill one another. From this sleep may we too rise, as out of the dark grave.
All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be, is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty to say so and to oppose. What else have we to live for?
What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.
I mistook your white head for a flower down there among the tall grasses and flowers of the garden border. And then I knew you, your years upon you like a crown of glory.
Nell’s small grave, opening at the garden’s edge to receive her out of this world’s sight forever, reopens many graves. Digging, the old man grieves for his old dog with all the grief he knows, which seems again to be approaching enough, though he knows there is more.
Think of it! To fly by mere gift, without the clamor and stain of our inert metal, in perfect trust. It is the Sabbath of the birds that so moves me. They belong in their ever-returning song, in their flight, in their faith in the upholding air, to the Original World. They are above us and yet of us, for those who fly fall, like those who walk.
A hawk in flight The clearing sky A young man’s thought An old man’s cry
Born by our birth Here on the earth Our flesh to wear Our death to bear
The market is a grave Where goods lie dead that ought To live and grow and thrive, The dear world sold and bought To be destroyed by fire, Forest and soil and stone. The conscience put to hire Rules over flesh and bone. To take the coal to burn They overturn the world And all the world has worn Of grace, of health.
Leaving hope to the dark and to a better day, receive these beauties freely given, and give thanks.
Is it concentration of the mind, our unresting counting that leaves us standing blind in our dust? In time we are present only by forgetting time.
Those who use the world assuming their knowledge is sufficient destroy the world. The forest is mangled for the sale of a few sticks, or is bulldozed into a stream and covered over with the earth it once stood upon. The stream turns foul, killing the creatures that once lived from it. Industrial humanity, an alien species, lives by death. In the clutter of facts, the destroyers leave behind them one big story, of the world and the world’s end, that they don’t know. They know names and little stories. But the names of everything are not everything.
Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it as you care for no other place, this place that you belong to though it is not yours, for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you. Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it before they had heard a radio. Speak publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
But first he must disappear, and this he foresees with hope, with thanks. Let others come.
Walk, poem. Watch, and make no noise.
This is not the way the world is. It is a possibility nonetheless deeply seeded within the world. It is the way the world is sometimes.
In the name of more we destroy for coal the mountain and its forest and so choose the insatiable flame over the green leaf that within our care would return to us unendingly until the end of time.
To this dark blaze driving the inert metal of our most high desire we offer our land as fuel, thus offering ourselves at last to be burned. This is our riddle to which the answer is a life that none of us has lived.
How little I know in my widest waking, held here by the making of days, days of work, days, fewer, of rest, suffering myself to be made by days that cannot be helped or changed or stopped, and so I wait to be changed by work, by rest, by what I know into what I know not.
The old know well the world is the place of the absence of many known, loved, and gone, as the mind might contain a sky empty of birds, an earth without landmark trees.
Like mice and sparrows, so to speak, We’re squeaking by. We hear the squeak.
All it has so far been is past, long past, and yet I see it with the young eyes of that May, present as today.
VII Blesséd be the vireo who, leaving, leaves not even a track.
You must live in the day as it passes, willing to let it go. You must set it free.
Come in and walk among the shades.
Anger at humans, my own kind— I remember how it carried me, joyous in self’s self-exaltation, through a narrow opening as at birth into the great hollow of the dark itself where the unappeasable, in unending revenge for revenge, tread each alone the circle of no known beginning or end. And that is Hell.
Moonlight, daylight, pink clouds eastward, cries of geese flying north, the river quiet. Heavenly the bluebells whose freshness cannot be remembered from one April until the next.
among duller trunks and branches a dogwood flower-white lighting all the woods. April 30, 2011
I have watched this place, fearing for it in the storms of history, three score years and ten and more. What, then, after so long awake, do I affirm? Human-hurt as it is, it is unending in its beauty, hour by hour.
Do not live for death, pay it no fear or wonder. This is the firmest law of the truest faith. Death is the dew that wets the grass in the early morning dark. It is God’s entirely. Withdraw your fatal homage, and live.
Once there was nothing, not even darkness, not even silence, not even nothing. Think of that.
Between the sky and the earth lights and shadows darted and danced among the leaves.
If tonight the world ends, we’ll have had this day.
Sit and be quiet. In a while the red berries, now in shadow, will be picked out by the sun.
