If Still Your Orchards Bear
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Brother, that breathe the August air Ten thousand years from now, And smell --- if still your orchards bear Tart apples on the bough --- The early windfall under the tree, And see the red fruit shine, I cannot think your thoughts will be Much different from mine. Should at that moment the full moon Step forth upon the hill, And memories hard to bear, By moonlight harder still, Form in the shadows of the trees, --- Things that you could not spare And live, or so you thought, yet these Are gone, and you still there, A man no longer what he was, Nor yet the thing he'd planned, The chilly apple from the grass Warmed by your living hand --- I think you will have need of tears; I think they will not flow; Supposing in ten thousand years Men ache, as they do now.
3 Comments
Thank you for the poem above
I used to visit my granddads orchard (now a hi tech company) and remember back the smells of young apples, and his hard work…
Comments section on this interface make the following poem look very ugly. Look up a more attractive presentation of it. But here it is, what I consider the Unofficial Poem of Acorn Abbey:
Wallace Stevens
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
David, this photo came out so beautiful. I was very attuned to that full moon. More to the point, I can see a 20 X 20 print framed simply but handsomely. I’ve always fretted that there is not enough artwork on the walls at the Abbey. Maybe you can start producing your own!
DCS
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