Now, to the living, only grief has shown

The little yellow of the violet

Risen again out of the dead year’s leaves,

And grief alone is the measure of the love

That only lives by rising out of graves.

X.

The sky bright after summer-ending rain

I sat against an oak half up the climb.

The sun was low; the woods was hushed in shadow;

Now the long shimmer of the crickets’ song

Had stopped. I looked up to the westward ridge

And saw the ripe October light again,

Shining through leaves still green yet turning gold.

Those glowing leaves made of the light a place

That time and leaf would leave. The wind came cool,

And then I knew that I was present in

The long age of the passing world, in which

I once was not, now am, and will not be,

And in that time, beneath the changing tree,

I rested in a keeping not my own.

XI.

To give mind to machines, they are calling it

out of the world, out of the neighborhood, out of the body.

They have bound it in the brain, in the hard shell

of the skull, in order to bind it in a machine.

From the heron flying home at dusk,

from the misty hollows at sunrise,

from the stories told at the row’s end,

they are calling the mind into exile

in the dry circuits of machines.

XII.

I walk in openings

That when I’m dead will close.

Where the field sparrow sings

Will come the sweet wild rose.

The yellowthroat will claim

The tangle with his song,

The redbud and wild plum

Light up the hill in spring

Where in the morning shade

My team of horses drew

The chattering iron blade,

Their fetlocks wet with dew

Briar, bittersweet, and fern,

Box elder, locust, elm,

Cedar, wild grape, and thorn

Will reinstate the time

Of deep root and wide shadow,

Of bright, hot August calm

On the small, tree-ringed meadow

Of goldenrod and bee balm.

Thicket will grow up through

The thatches of the grass,

An old way turning new

As lives and wishes pass.

And as the thicket dies

The hickory ash, and oak

Of the true woods will rise

Across a long time, like

Will speak to like, the breeze

Resume old music in

The branch-ends of the trees,

The long age come again.

The hard field will find ease

In being thus released:

Let it grow wild in peace,

My workplace come to rest.

To speed this change of goods

I spare the seedling trees,

And thus invoke the woods,

The genius of this place;

I stop the mower blade,

And so conspire with time

In the return of shade,

Completion of this rhyme.

XIII.

The body in the invisible

Familiar room accepts the gift

Of sleep, and for a while is still;

Instead of will, it lives by drift

In the great night that gathers up