Today’s poem is “A Hill the Country” by Henry Braun, who lived off the grid in Temple, Maine in an old farmhouse he and his wife Joan bought in 1962. He was a teacher of writing and literature at Temple University and the author of two books of poems The Vergil Woods and Loyalty.
Henry died in 2014 at the age of 84. Joan writes about him and his time in Temple: “A cityboy, he immersed himself in the immediate landscape, and daily ‘paid close attention’ to its wonders, learning of its rich and hard history, recalling the people who left behind the first arrowheads, and the farmers who cleared and plowed the rocky landscape.”
A Hill in the Country
by Henry Braun
It isn’t far in Maine
to the end of the past,
the quiet pipe, the random arrowhead.
The mountains are alone
with Thoreau’s sun
in their ranges
and evergreens carpet all the peaks.
While on a moonlit night I fumble
to unlock the farmhouse,
the skyline of an old key
moves like a lost city.
On this hill whose curve
traces an indecipherable longing,
let me build my city,
the layer of all I saw and felt
a close cover on the naked rock
of Maine,
and in its hidden park
let me now closely learn
the mushrooms, the trees, the birds, the stars.
Poem copyright © 2006 Henry Braun.
Reprinted from Loyalty, Off the Grid Press, 2006, by permission of Joan Braun.