In the quiet

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog, head half out of water utters
the cantellations he sang in his first spring
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees,
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing,
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens
when one has lived a long time alone.

Galway Kinnel