White and Green

The wind scrubbing it, the bay

is like a field of green grass

and the white seagulls afloat

in the hackling of the green bay

are like white flowers blooming

in the field,

                 for they are white

and come there, and are still

a while, and leave, and leaving

leave no sign they ever were there.

Green in no memorial to white.

There’s danger in it. They fly

beyond idea till they come back.

     —Wendell Berry

Praise in Summer

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

as sometimes summer calls us all, I said

the hills are heavens full of branching ways

where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

see how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

perverts our praise to uncreation, why

such savor's in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

the world to know it? To a praiseful eye

should it not be enough of fresh and strange

that trees grow green, and moles can course

in clay,

and sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

—Richard Wilbur

A Summer Morning

Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

—Richard Wilbur