By the fall of years I learn how it has been
With Jack Beechum, Mat Feltner, Elton Penn,
And their kind, men made for their fields.
I see them stand their ground, bear their yields,
Swaying in all weathers in their long rows,
In the dance that fleshes desire and then goes
Down with the light. They have gone as they came,
And they go. They go by a kind of will. They claim
In the brevity of their strength an ancient joy.
“Make me know it! Hand it to me, boy!”
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
October’s completing light falls
on the unfinished patterns of my year.
The sun is yellow in a smudge
of public lies we no longer try
to believe. Speech finally drives us
to silence. Power has weakened us.
Comfort wakens us in fear. We are
a people who must decline or perish.
I have let my mind at last bend down
where human vision begins its rise
in the dark of seeds, wombs of beasts.
It has carried my hands to roots
and foundings, to the mute urging
that in human care clears the field
and turns it green. It reaches
the silence at the tongue’s root
in which speech begins. In early mist
I walk in these reopening fields
as in a forefather’s dream. In dream
and sweat the fields have seasoning.
Let my words then begin in labor.
Let me sing a work song
and an earth song. Let the song of light
fall upon me as it may.
The end of this is not in sight.
And I come to the waning of the year
weary, the way long.