Connecticut Countryside

All afternoon we follow the trim roads threading

The caught valley sun and the wind-sharpened hills,

The little lakes like droppings of pearl among cedar,

The nervous, named brooks, lacing light over granite,

And the closed mills

In the shadow of willow - red brick glossy with ivy

Edging the villages; under elms shaped for sleep

Dun-shingled houses parlor-dark behind shutters,

Obedient lawns, delphinium-blue gardens

Sheltered and deep.

But what are the voices beneath this Sunday quiet,

This false content, that whisper of danger - cry

Already under the June green: what wound to

The summer meadows, death to the eyelids of dreamers,

Possessors? Why

Must that terror common to Asian plains, the far cities,

The trade-doomed walls of Europe, her exhausted fields,

Touch us here also, pluck at the vulnerable pattern

(Long are the reaching fingers of the destroyers!)

Till the fabric yields

And the roads split, lakes crack like glass, churches

Crumble by the mill walls; and following the ghost

Of bloom, the stench of carrion in the gardens

Strikes our late senses: we who defer, deliberate,

Watch, fear - and are lost.