The gra** is bleached by summer sun
The dry pods rustle underfoot,
On quartz-bright rocks the lichens creep
Like frail anemones betrayed
Still trembling towards an unknown sea.
Up the steep shoulder of the hill
The wind goes scattering seeds of light.
Here at the edge the mind goes on,
The eyes go on, though steps must stop
At plunging scarps where dizzily
The plumes of haze shroud and unshroud
Knife-edge and scree; and down and down
Still sight must drop, be cut and grazed,
To find at last the dry creek-bed.
This is no landscape for the eye
Cupped by a hand to shield the mind
From earth's most naked cruelty.
Who looks the longest must take on
The fierceness of the eagle-hawk,
His hungry thought, his still intent,
His burnished, undeflected eye.
How fared they then who built and lived
Beneath the shoulder of the hill,
Who planted with their hopeful hands
The oak, the fruit, the sheltering hedge,
The store, the church, the bakery
Where still the letters are discerned
That here for man is meal, his bread.
The houses lean against the wind,
Their eyes are scarfed with sheets of tin,
I heard in all that stillness once
The cracked complaining of the bell.
A door that shut on nothing scraped,
And with a turning, sick unease
I saw a child's discarded shoe.
Was it on such a summer's day
They gathered from the bakery,
The store, the church, and, beckoned on
By the compulsion of the fall,
Plunged to those knife-edged silences?
His mind, as mine, will veer away
Who lacks the hawks' unwavering eye.