Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Though the clear morning stood
composed”cloud, dew, and leaf,
the whole shimmering wood”
now it all seems past belief.

We know what happened. How
a man came with his camera
to take these stills of bough
and branch. The old chimera

of harder days had gone
underground. But what brought
him here was not the dawn
light, the tall trunks caught

in chiaroscuro, or
twigs dense as tangled thread.
He’d seen these woods before.
Now past and present wed

the way, in textbooks, bone
at one turn of the page
will suddenly have grown
nerve, muscle, and cartilage”

those intricate details
obscuring what was there.
How to weigh these in the scales
”moss, lichen, the pure air”

with what we’ve already seen:
the fluttering rags, those drawn-
faced children beneath the lean
birches that earlier dawn?

Just so, the story ends
laved clean in August sun.
And still the mind contends
with what can’t be undone:

thick, sun-shot canopies
billowing overhead;
and, beneath the Polish trees,
those faces of the dead”

how beauty and brute fact
here buckle, overlaid
in snapshots, each exact,
in brilliance and in shade.

Dear Reader,

We launched the First Things 2023 Year-End Campaign to keep articles like the one you just read free of charge to everyone.

Measured in dollars and cents, this doesn't make sense. But consider who is able to read First Things: pastors and priests, college students and professors, young professionals and families. Last year, we had more than three million unique readers on firstthings.com.

Informing and inspiring these people is why First Things doesn't only think in terms of dollars and cents. And it's why we urgently need your year-end support.

Will you give today?

Make My Gift