Lowing of cattle: your voice, to the mind of Virgil,
felt mellifluous, as it does this evening
when a cloud slips off into the dark of the sky,
or as when dawn on the transfixing fields
pours dew in streams and daylight. You say:

Ripen, wheatfields under the wind! Hayfields
flourish! Let earth, waving its green plume
over the meadow, sing in the brookwater
of a golden harvest! Live, you fellow beasts! you,
bushes, even gravel crunched by hooves, and you too,
herdsmen, live! Let sunset pour across the field

the trees of shadow that rear up onto the far slope,
huge, where farmers come down from the mountain,
tanned, toward woodsmoke rising from farmhouses,
thirsty, longing for the sight of wives and children,
for the warmth of them in arms that ache with clearing
stone from pasture. Let the desire, increased in them
with each step, overflow the expanded shadows.