The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves, one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above. For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left, set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman, so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air. Wendell Berry