By use of other lives.
No gratitude atones
For bad use or too much.

This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the ground.
In its ambition and
Its greed, its violence,
The world is turned against
This possibility,
And yet the world survives
By the survival of
This kindly working love.

And while you work your fields
Do not forget the woods.
The woods stands by the field
To measure it, and teach
Its keeper. Nature is
The best farmer, for she
Preserves the land, conserves
The rain; she deepens soil,
Wastes nothing; and she is
Diverse and orderly.
She is our mother, teacher,
And final judge on earth.
The farm’s a human order
Opening among the trees,
Remembering the woods.
To farm, live like a tree
That does not grow beyond
The power of its place.
A tree stands in its place
And rises by the strength
Of local soil and light,
Aspiring to no height
That it has not attained.
More time, more light, more rain
Will make it grow again
Till it has realized
All that it can become,
And then it dies into
More life, deserving more
By not desiring more.

The year’s first fullness comes
To the hayfields. In May,
Watching the sky, you mow
Your fields before the grass
Toughens and while the clover
Stands in its early bloom.
But weather’s iffy here
In May, and in these close
Valleys, the early cutting
Is hard to cure. Some rain
Will fall on swath or windrow,
As like as not, to darken
The hay. ‘It beats a snowball,’
You say then to console
Yourself, and look ahead
To later cuttings, lighter,
Better, quicker to dry.
In summer, thus, you think
Of winter, load the barns
In heat against the cold,
The January days
When you’ll go out to feed,
Your breath a little cloud,
The blue air glittery
With frost. On the tracked snow
On ground that’s frozen hard
You free the smell of summer
From bales of hay thrown down
Before the hungry stock.

Soon you have salad greens
Out of the garden rows,
Then peas, early potatoes,
Onions, beets, beans, sweet corn.
The bounty of the year
Now comes in like a tide:
Yellow summer squashes,
Pole beans from the cornfield,
Tomatoes, okra, eggplant,
Cabbage and cauliflower.
Eat, and give to the neighbors;
Preserve for wintertime.
Plant more, and fight the weeds.
Later will come the fall crops:
Turnips, parsnips, more greens,
The winter squashes, cushaws,
And pumpkins big as tubs.
‘Too much for us,’ you’ll say,
And give some more away—
Or try to; nowadays,
A lot of people would
Rather work hard to buy
Their food already cooked
Than get it free by work.

Best of all is the fruit,
Sweetest and prettiest:
The strawberries and cherries,
The gooseberries and currants,
Raspberries and blackberries
(The best are wild), grapes, pears,
Apples early and late—
These gleamings in the sun
That gleam upon the tongue
And gleam put up in jars
And gleam within the mind.