The Poetry of the Earth

Laying in bed, last night.

No lights, windows open.  Just the fingernail clip of a yellow moon keeping an eye on things.

And a serenade by the end-of-summer choir of crickets.

"How many crickets do you think we are hearing? Like 100? Or 14? Or like a million?"

"I don't know."

"I wonder."

I send a thought out of my 2nd story window, down and into the night, the dark, through the old oak tree branches, slipping to the dewy grass, into the crevices of the tiger lilies.

Goodnight, sweet crickets, constant in this night, rocking me to sleep. Your song nearly makes me weep, carries me softly back thirty years of summer eves.

THE POETRY of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills. John Keats, December 30, 1816.