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
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.
