SOWING by Wendell Berry

In the stilled place that once was a road
going down from the town to the river,
and where 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 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.