EARTH-SONG

This poem came from reading the extract below:

…I listened to the ancient, familiar, immortal, dear cricket sound under all others, hearing at first some distinct chirps; but when these ceased I was aware of the general earth-song, which my hearing had not heard, amid which these were only taller flowers in a bed, and I wondered if behind or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal.

Henry David Thoreau, ‘The Journal 1837 -1861’

Earth-song

Ethereal as emanating mist,

the earth-song is exhaled
by the fundament beneath old trees

where leaves have lain decaying

for a thousand years.

Its melody recalls

the whispering of wind

in forests on a summer night;

its words, the cry of hunting owls

and the winter creaking

of an old oak’s boughs.

No god or man or spirit

could ever make this song.

It was its own creator,

born of a long continuum

between the earth and sky,

and everything that’s lived here

has added its own note:

foxes, moles and badgers

who dig deep into the mould

where man was never buried,

and the subtle hare

who, living overground,

dances in the frosting hoar of March

beneath a smiling moon,

as the song comes seeping gently

from the woods and hedgerows,

through sodden furrows of the plough

and grassy meadowland

that never nurtured corn.