The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

the Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies

on water; it glides 

so from the walker, it turns

dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed 

by a chameleon's tuning his skin to it; 

as a mantis, arranged 

on a green leaf, grows

into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

any greenness is greener than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

they are not only yours; the beautiful changes

in such kind ways, 

wishing ever to sunder

things and Thing's selves for a second finding, to lose 

for a moment all that it touches back to wonder. 

—Richard Wilbur

The Silence

Though the air is full of singing

my head is loud

with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich

with fruit, my tongue

hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden

I cannot stand beside it

mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves

stir and fall with a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men's silence

like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

 
 —Wendell Berry

Setting Out

Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.

     
—Wendell Berry