Words to a Son

THE trees speak in the night, the birds in the dawn
and evening have their mutual language. Listen
to the feathered throat and the leafed one tugging its twig.
Also put your ear to the grass when the wind
bends it at midday and the thrush is silent.

The ploughman’s voice when he calls to his horse is the sound
of opening loam and the voice of the standing corn.
The calls of the men to each other out of the fields
under the noon sun have a far bronze clearness:
they are not words but a speaking of the hour
and a burned throat dreaming of the cool of water.

I tell you this of an heroic age:
orchards we have with fruit that rots untasted
save by the mouths of meadow creatures climbing
up to the slope of apples or the mountain
deer come down. And slowly hummock rabbits
girdle the bark of apple undersnow.

The barren hills we have too, sand and thistle,
the empty pasture and the gaping barn,
the doorsills sagging and the silver house
buried in lilacs. Cellar-holes we have,
fireweed the tenant and the last believer.

I tell you this of a great age peopled with heroes:
we have gnawed the shape of the earth as a rabbit gnaws
the bole of a tree, and the shouts of the toothless were sweetest.
We have circled the earth in the air like a dizzy bird,
and the difficult question is finished. The earth is round.

The dark trees speak in the night and the birds with dawn,
the grass at midday speaks, and with midsummer
the melancholy cricket talks of autumn.
The voice of the herdsman calling his cows comes down
with the clang of the wandering bell and the valley welcomes
the briefer shout and the thud of obedient hooves.

Put down your ear to the grass and the wind therein;
lie in the corn and hear the foretelling wings;
stand in the field at midnight, count the stars,
touch with your thumb plough-blisters in your hands:
stand, you, in a change of wind and listen.