the wild

In the empty lot - a place

not natural, but wild - among

the trash of human absence,

the slough and shamble

of the city's seasons, a few

old locusts bloom.

A few woods birds

fly and sing

in the new foliage

 - warblers and tanagers, birds

wild as leaves; in a million

each one would be rare,

new to the eyes.  A man

couldn't make a habit

of such color,

such flight and singing.

But they are the habit of this 

wasted place.  In them

the ground is wise.  They are

its remembrance of what it is.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems