Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built, when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies da… - William Stafford

Lines to Stop Talking By

In your city today outside my room
Some quiet animal or only the rain
At its patient task was opening the wall
By touching it, and whatever was there
Spread outward a bit at a time toward the horizon
Cresting ahead and breaking, the way
All through your life whatever is near extends
When you think. In your city today
I thought of Never, hiding inside
An iceberg floating south rinsed by the days
Till that great blind ice blinks open in the center.
I heard an ambulance carry its banner away
In the rain in your city. And I thought of
My poems- how they are always there
Waiting to try for that circumference
It takes all of us to find.

"Assurance"

You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?