The world is wide, we say, and this is comforting
though perhaps it shouldn’t be. We lie down
at day’s end beneath this apple tree, or that one.
We try
hard to love our families a little more
than
strangers. We die in particular sick beds
behind
the thick stone walls of homes we built
ourselves.
We go. We go like field mice, we go
gently,
we go quick or slow, but we all go, in rows
like
golden fruit trees, yellow wheat. We go sheet
white
and hope the night is friendly. We go knowing
that our
kin will mow what’s left to mow and this
is also
comforting. The world is wide. The world is
wider
than we know. One cannot see the shape
of it
from here below, but there are many rivers.
There
are roads that must lead somewhere, surely.
Only we
grow very tired by nightfall, ride the empty
hay cart
down the hill to town in silence. Bullfrogs
crow
from pondside hideouts. Vespers bell toll beds
us down
from just around those hills. Some days
we dream
of picking up and going for that plume
of
smoke — that one on the horizon, wanly rising
into
blue. Sometimes it is all that gets us through
this
grueling scything, trying on the lithe life-suits
of
strangers. We go riding off. We leave our work,
our
husbands, wives still picnicking behind us. Leave
our
children filthy, in their play clothes, shrieking
from a
green patch. One day — we’d never want away
for any
longer. Still, it’s dangerous. The elders say
they
don’t come back that go that way, that wander
in dusk
light neglecting reaping. Better to lie down
in one’s
own mown meadow and be grateful for soft
ground.
Far better knowing, going quietly, beloved,
than
falling too soon from a sky we do not recognize.
-- Chelsea Whitton
