The ducks and hens
tread the farmyard to a shitty green.
The smallholders are indoors praying.
Plaster crumbles off the walls.
The little stream meanders
through its soggy meadow.
The willow harbors Alexander,
Caesar is in the nettle stone.
The great names of the world
are at large in the beet-fields,
for all that spiders weave,
and the spitz barks at vagrants.
Rats pipe in the cellar,
a line of verse skims in the butterfly light,
the saps of the world learn to circulate,
smoke rises like a fiery poem.