My eye fell on this poem this morning.
Beneath the Snow, the Badger's Steady Breathing
Beneath the snow,
the badger's steady breathing.
He does not count the cold as cold.
He does not call his hunger fate.
He sett is neither large nor small.
Not dark.
Closer to tree root than human.
Closer to the wilderness
than to its saints
who sought to learn from where
they'd moved.
A life uninterrupting,
without want or aspiration.
A persistence.
And yet not meager. Not unfeeling.
-- Sharp starlight coming all the way
down to the snow.
- Jane Hirshfield
from AFTER (February 2006)
