The Common Root, The Open Field

The sun is a golden carpenter, planed and raw,Not a thought of God, just the heat upon the stone.I see with eyes that have forgotten how to name,Stripping the silk from the corn, the myth from the bone.I am the keeper of flocks that are only the passing wind,Content to let the river be water, and the air be thinned.
And so the valley breathes a deep, fern-scented sigh,Where ancient hemlocks haunt the mist-drenched floor.There is a poetry in the granite’s edge, the eagle’s cry,The rhythmic pulse of the river’s wild and hidden roar.I see the silver birch’s bark, a lily in the gloom,And the vast, tangled geometry of the mountain’s room.
Yet, look closer—there is a circuit made of sun, Where silent cells weave the carbon from the air. The plant is not a thing, but a process, a runA thinking heart that finds the cosmic everywhere.The earth is a living being, dreaming in the dark,Waiting for the human soul to strike the inner spark.
I walk the lanes where a poet lost his mind to find his soul,Naming every nested bird and the trembling of the rye.The fences steal the common, but they cannot take the wholeOf the vast, unlettered music of the open summer sky.The badger in the brake, the lady-smock in the dew—Simple things are the only things that are ever truly true.
And when the world begins to fray, when the shadows grow too long,A steady hand reaches out and leads me through the grief.To love the world is to mourn it, a fierce and ancient song,Finding the "Great Turning" in the falling of a leaf.We are the web itself, the pulse of the ancient deep,Awakening from the long, industrial, lonely sleep.
Finally, there is the white silence of a master’s hand,Where the word is a body, bare and salt-washed by the sea.A solar clarity that understands the shifting sand,And the brief, bright miracle of what it means to be.Just the earth. Just the light. Just this breath we share—The common root of everything, blossoming in the air.