“In the stilled place that once was a road going down

From the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world. ”

— Wendell Berry