You Can't Take The Sky From Me

"Boyhood in Tobacco Country" by Robert Penn Warren

All I can dream tonight is an autumn sunset,

Red as hayrick burning. The groves,

Not yet leafless, are black against red, as though, 

Leaf by leaf, they were hammered of bronze blackened

To timelessness. Far off, from the curing barns of tobacco,

Blue smoke, in pale streaking, clings

To the world's dim, undefinable bulge.

Far past slashed stubs, homeward or homeless, a black

Voice, deeper and bluer than sea-heart, sweeter

Than sadness or sorghum, utters the namelessness

Of life to the birth of a first star,

And again, I am walking a dusk-silent, dusky lane, and try

To forget my own name and be part of the world.

I move in its timelessness. From the deep and premature midnight 

Of woodland, I hear the first whip-o-will's

Precious grief, and my young heart,

As darkling I stand, yearns for a grief

To be worthy of that sound. Ah, fool! Meanwhile,

Arrogant, eastward, lifts the slow dawn of the harvest moon.

Enormous, smoky, smoldering, it stirs.

First visibly, then paling in retardation, it begins

The long climb zenithward to preside

There whitely on what the year has wrought.

What have the years wrought? I walk the house.

Oh, grief! Oh, joy! Tonight

The same season's moon holds sky-height.

The dark roof hides the sky.

"Full Moon" by William Clayton