Listening

with a microphone plugged into the earth.
We can hear ferns creaking, rabbit-chatter,
beech-roots muscling up through the dirt.

We can hear bones turning, bees spawning,
mushrooms growing, ants drinking sap.
When we take our earphones off we can hear

earth's huge silence listening back.

Peter Bland, from Selected Poems

Listening

The baby leans
and listens
to that ocean inside.
You hold him,
you can hear it
as the lions hear it
deep in the grass.
We tire ourselves out
swimming in the outside ocean
which we try to cross.
Listen---this is the strange love
for sounds
of all those helpless ones.
Don't you know an old person
who has heard
the collapse inward
of outer logs
falling to the fire?

Hunt Hawkins, from The Domestic Life