Nature Poetry

• The Rovers
  

  Over the fields we go, through the sweets of the purple clover,
  That letters a message for us as for every vagrant rover;
  Before us the dells are abloom, and a leaping brook calls after,
  Feeling its kinship with us in lore of dreams and laughter.

  Out of the valleys of moonlight elfin voices are calling;
  Down from the misty hills faint, far greetings are falling;
  Whisper the grasses to us, murmuring gleeful and airy,
  Knowing us pixy-led, seeking the haunts of faery.

  The wind is our joyful comrade wherever our free feet wander,
  Over the tawny wolds to the meres and meadows yonder;
  The mild-eyed stars go with us, or the rain so swiftly flying,
  Racing us over the wastes where the hemlocks and pines are sighing.

  Across the upland dim, down through the beckoning hollow-
  Oh, we go too far and fast for the feet of care to follow!
  The gypsy fire in our hearts for the wilderness wide and luring;
  Other loves may fail but this is great and enduring.

  Other delights may pall, but the joy of the open never;
  The charm of the silent places must win and hold us forever;
  Bondage of walls we leave with never a glance behind us.
  Under the lucent sky the delights of the rover shall find us.

  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• A Green Cornfield
  

  The earth was green, the sky was blue:
  I saw and heard one sunny morn
  A skylark hang betweent he two,
  A singing speck above the corn;

  A stage below, in gay accord,
  White butterflies danced on the wing,
  And still the singing skylark soared,
  And silent sank and soared to sing.

  The cornfield stretched a tender green
  To right and left beside my walks;
  I knew he had a nest unseen
  Somewhere among the million stalks.

  And as I paused to hear his song
  While swift the sunny moments slid,
  Perhaps his mate sat listening long,
  And listened longer than I did.

  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• The Word Of God
  

  From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
  Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...
  We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
  And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
  Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
  Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
  The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
  Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

  There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
  Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
  Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
  Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still
  High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
  The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
  We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
  Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.

  By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
  How the living things that are descend from things that were.
  The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
  These tiny, humble, wordless things -- how shall they tell us lies?
  We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
  The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
  Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
  Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.

  And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade
  Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
  Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
  The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
  Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
  The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
  So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
  Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.

  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• To The Lake
  

  In Spring of youth it was my lot
  To haunt of the wide world a spot
  The which I could not love the less -
  So lovely was the loneliness
  Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
  And the tall pines that towered around.

  But when the night had thrown her pall
  Upon that spot, as upon all,
  And the mystic wind went by
  Murmuring in melody -
  Then - ah, then, I would awake
  To the terror of the lone lake.

  Yet that terror was not fright,
  But a tremulous delight -
  A feeling not the jewelled mine
  Could teach or bribe me to define -
  Nor Love - although the love were thine.

  Death was in that poisonous wave,
  And in its gulf a fitting grave
  For him who thence could solace bring
  To his lone imagining -
  Whose solitary soul could make
  An Eden of that dim lake.

  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• We Are Made One with What We Touch and See
  

  We are resolved into the supreme air,
  We are made one with what we touch and see,
  With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
  With our young lives each springimpassioned tree
  Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
  The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

  With beat of systole and of diastole
  One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,
  And mighty waves of single Being roll
  From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
  Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
  One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill

  One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
  Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
  The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
  At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
  Than we do, when in some freshblossoming wood
  We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good

  Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
  Or is this daedalfashioned earth less fair,
  That we are nature's heritors, and one
  With every pulse of life that beats the air?
  Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
  New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

  And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
  Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
  Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
  Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
  Part of the mighty universal whole,
  And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!.

  We shall be notes in that great Symphony
  Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
  And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
  One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
  Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
  The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!.

  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• The Moon
  
  You can take the moon by the spoonful
  or in capsules every two hours.
  It's useful as a hypnotic and sedative
  and besides it relieves
  those who have had too much philosophy.
  A piece of moon in your purse
  works better than a rabbit's foot.
  Helps you find a lover
  or get rich without anyone knowing,
  and it staves off doctors and clinics.
  You can give it to children like candy
  when they've not gone to sleep,
  and a few drops of moon in the eyes of the old
  helps them to die in peace.
  
  Put a new leaf of moon
  under your pillow
  and you'll see what you want to.
  Always carry a little bottle of air of the moon
  to keep you from drowning.
  Give the key to the moon
  to prisoners and the disappointed.
  For those who are sentenced to death
  and for those who are sentenced to life
  there is no better tonic than the moon
  in precise and regular doses.
  
  In Nature - 115 days ago
• Tree at my Window
  

  Tree at my window, window tree,
  My sash is lowered when night comes on;
  But let there never be curtain drawn
  Between you and me.

  Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
  And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
  Not all your light tongues talking aloud
  Could be profound.

  But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
  And if you have seen me when I slept,
  You have seen me when I was taken and swept
  And all but lost.

  That day she put our heads together,
  Fate had her imagination about her,
  Your head so much concerned with outer,
  Mine with inner, weather.

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• To Earthward
  

  Love at the lips was touch
  As sweet as I could bear;
  And once that seemed too much;
  I lived on air

  That crossed me from sweet things,
  The flow of- was it musk
  From hidden grapevine springs
  Down hill at dusk?

  I had the swirl and ache
  From sprays of honeysuckle
  That when they're gathered shake
  Dew on the knuckle.

  I craved strong sweets, but those
  Seemed strong when I was young;
  The petal of the rose
  It was that stung.

  Now no joy but lacks salt
  That is not dashed with pain
  And weariness and fault;
  I crave the stain

  Of tears, the aftermark
  Of almost too much love,
  The sweet of bitter bark
  And burning clove.

  When stiff and sore and scarred
  I take away my hand
  From leaning on it hard
  In grass and sand,

  The hurt is not enough:
  I long for weight and strength
  To feel the earth as rough
  To all my length.

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• The Tuft of Flowers
  

  I went to turn the grass once after one
  Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

  The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
  Before I came to view the levelled scene.

  I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
  I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

  But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
  And I must be, as he had been -- alone,

  'As all must be,' I said within my heart,
  'Whether they work together or apart.'

  But as I said it, swift there passed me by
  On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

  Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
  Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

  And once I marked his flight go round and round,
  As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

  And then he flew as far as eye could see,
  And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

  I thought of questions that have no reply,
  And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

  But he turned first, and led my eye to look
  At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

  A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
  Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

  The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
  By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

  Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
  But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

  The butterfly and I had lit upon,
  Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

  That made me hear the wakening birds around,
  And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

  And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
  So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

  But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
  And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

  And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
  With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

  'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
  'Whether they work together or apart.'

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• The Star-Splitter
  

  `You know Orion always comes up sideways.
  Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
  And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
  Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
  I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
  After the ground is frozen, I should have done
  Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
  Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
  To make fun of my way of doing things,
  Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
  Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
  These forces are obliged to pay respect to?'
  So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
  Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
  Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
  He burned his house down for the fire insurance
  And spent the proceeds on a telescope
  To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
  About our place among the infinities.

  `What do you want with one of those blame things?'
  I asked him well beforehand. `Don't you get one!'

  `Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
  More blameless in the sense of being less
  A weapon in our human fight,' he said.
  `I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.'
  There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
  And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
  Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
  Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
  He burned his house down for the fire insurance
  And bought the telescope with what it came to.
  He had been heard to say by several:
  `The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
  The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
  A telescope. Someone in every town
  Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
  In Littleton it might as well be me.'
  After such loose talk it was no surprise
  When he did what he did and burned his house down.

  Mean laughter went about the town that day
  To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
  And he could wait---we'd see to him tomorrow.
  But the first thing next morning we reflected
  If one by one we counted people out
  For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
  To get so we had no one left to live with.
  For to be social is to be forgiving.
  Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
  We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
  But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
  He promptly gives it back, that is if still
  Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
  It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
  About his telescope. Beyond the age
  Of being given one for Christmas gift,
  He had to take the best way he knew how
  To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
  He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
  Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
  A good old-timer dating back along;
  But a house isn't sentient; the house
  Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
  Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
  And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
  Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

  Out of a house and so out of a farm
  At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
  To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
  As under-ticket-agent at a station
  Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,
  Was setting out, up track and down, not plants
  As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
  That varied in their hue from red to green.

  He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
  His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
  Often he bid me come and have a look
  Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
  At a star quaking in the other end.
  I recollect a night of broken clouds
  And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
  And melting further in the wind to mud.
  Bradford and I had out the telescope.
  We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
  Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
  And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
  Said some of the best things we ever said.
  That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
  Because it didn't do a thing but split
  A star in two or three, the way you split
  A globule of quicksilver in your hand
  With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
  It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
  And ought to do some good if splitting stars
  'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

  We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
  Do we know any better where we are,
  And how it stands between the night tonight
  And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
  How different from the way it ever stood?

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• The Oven Bird
  There is a singer everyone has heard,
  Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
  Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
  He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
  Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
  he says the early petal-fall is past
  When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
  On sunny days a moment overcast;
  And comes that other fall we name the fall.
  He says the highway dust is over all.
  The bird would cease and be as other birds
  But that he knows in singing not to sing.
  The question that he frames in all but words
  Is what to make of a diminished thing.
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• The Mountain
  

  The mountain held the town as in a shadow.
  I saw so much before I slept there once:
  I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
  Where its black body cut into the sky.
  Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
  Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
  And yet between the town and it I found,
  When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
  Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.
  The river at the time was fallen away,
  And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;
  But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
  Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
  Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.
  I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
  And there I met a man who moved so slow
  With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
  It seemed no harm to stop him altogether.

  'What town is this?' I asked.

  'This? Lunenburg.'

  Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
  Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
  But only felt at night its shadowy presence.
  'Where is your village? Very far from here?'

  'There is no village- only scattered farms.
  We were but sixty voters last election.
  We can't in nature grow to many more:
  That fling takes all the room!' He moved his goad.
  The mountain stood there to be pointed at.
  Pasture ran up the side a little way,
  And then there was a wall of trees with trunks:
  After that only tops of trees, and cliffs
  Imperfectly concealed among the leaves.
  A dry ravine emerged from under boughs
  Into the pasture.

  'That looks like a path.
  Is that the way to reach the top from here? --
  Not for this morning, but some other time:
  I must be getting back to breakfast now.'

  'I don't advise your trying from this side.
  There is no proper path, but those that have
  Been up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd's.
  That's five miles back. You can't mistake the place:
  They logged it there last winter some way up.
  I'd take you, but I'm bound the other way.'

  'You've never climbed it?'

  'I've been on the sides
  Deer-hunting and trout-fishing. There's a brook
  That starts up on it somewhere -- I've heard say
  Right on the top, tip-top -- a curious thing.
  But what would interest you about the brook,
  It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.
  One of the great sights going is to see
  It steam in winter like an ox's breath.
  Until the bushes all along its banks
  Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles --
  You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it !'

  'There ought to be a view around the world
  >From such a mountain -- if it isn't wooded
  Clear to the top.' I saw through leafy screens
  Great granite terraces in sun and shadow,
  Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up --
  With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;
  Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
  With little ferns in crevices at his elbow.

  'As to that I can't say. But there's the spring,
  Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.
  That ought to be worth seeing.'

  'If it's there....

  You never saw it?'

  'I guess there's no doubt
  About its being there. I never saw it.
  It may not be right on the very top:
  It wouldn't have to be a long way down
  To have some head of water from above,
  And a good distance down might not be noticed
  By anyone who'd come a long way up.
  One time I asked a fellow climbing it
  To look and tell me later how it was.'

  'What did he say?'

  'He said there was a lake
  Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.'

  'But a lake's different. What about the spring?'

  'He never got up high enough to see.
  That's why I don't advise your trying this side.
  He tried this side. I've always meant to go
  And look myself, but you know how it is:
  It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain
  You've worked around the foot of all your life.
  What would I do? Go in my overalls,
  With a big stick, the same as when the cows
  Haven't come down to the bars at milking time?
  Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
  'Twouldn't seem real to climb for climbing it.'

  'I shouldn't climb it if I didn't want to-v Not for the sake of climbing. What's its name?'

  'We call it Hor: I don't know if that's right.'

  'Can one walk round it? Would it be too far?'

  'You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,
  But it's as much as ever you can do,
  The boundary lines keep in so close to it.
  Hor is the township, and the township's Hor-
  And a few houses sprinkled round the foot,
  Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
  Rolled out a little farther than the rest.'

  'Warm in December, cold in June, you say?'

  'I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
  You and I know enough to know it's warm
  Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
  But all the fun's in how you say a thing.'

  'You've lived here all your life?'

  'Ever since Hor
  Was no bigger than a --' What, I did not hear.

  He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
  Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
  Gave them their marching orders, and was moving.

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• Spring Pools
  

  These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
  The total sky almost without defect,
  And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
  Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
  And yet not out by any brook or river,
  But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

  The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
  To darken nature and be summer woods --
  Let them think twice before they use their powers
  To blot out and drink up and sweep away
  These flowery waters and these watery flowers
  From snow that melted only yesterday.

  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• Once by the Pacific
  
  The shattered water made a misty din.
  Great waves looked over others coming in,
  And thought of doing something to the shore
  That water never did to land before.
  The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
  Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
  You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
  The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
  The cliff in being backed by continent;
  It looked as if a night of dark intent
  Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
  Someone had better be prepared for rage.
  There would be more than ocean-water broken
  Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
  
  In Nature - 149 days ago
• Going for Water
  

  The well was dry beside the door,
  And so we went with pail and can
  Across the fields behind the house
  To seek the brook if still it ran;

  Not loth to have excuse to go,
  Because the autumn eve was fair
  (Though chill), because the fields were ours,
  And by the brook our woods were there.

  We ran as if to meet the moon
  That slowly dawned behind the trees,
  The barren boughs without the leaves,
  Without the birds, without the breeze.

  But once within the wood, we paused
  Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,
  Ready to run to hiding new
  With laughter when she found us soon.

  Each laid on other a staying hand
  To listen ere we dared to look,
  And in the hush we joined to make
  We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

  A note as from a single place,
  A slender tinkling fail that made
  Now drops that floated on the pool
  Like pearls, and now a silver blade.

  
  In Nature - 150 days ago