At the time of fresh green tips on all pine branches,

As if they had been dipped, the lady-slippers are out,

And blueberry bushes are in white flower. At this time

Small mindless merciless flies gather at any face, or wrist,

And bite. The question-mark fern, the common fern,

Will answer itself in a few days of sun, and be two feet tall.

By then the lady-slipper will be dried up, the pine-tips dark,

The blueberry flower hard green dots. The flies are gone.

The nation is at its midsummer, or a half-century earlier.

Insect and foliage, a nation has its four seasons each once.

A man, with men to remind him of every age he has been,

Never knows himself, in any of his years at the very time.

Green-tipped boyhood he understands when he is old bark.

The man at forty-five says no one tells him how to be older,

Though fern or gnats could have told him, or berry-flowers:

One knows what he is by what grows near him, in what season.

Lightning, fungus, blight, ice, drought, rot, and dark,

Showing a man what he might have been without their teaching,

Come too late, and are in any case more than he needed.

The nation, being this man by millions having ancestors,

Could know which flowers can be picked for what birthday.

But nation is a word, not a knowing, neither housekeeper

Nor historian. History is a fieldbook twenty men write,

One or two men read, and nobody, or everybody, the nation,

Knows what to do with. After summer, the fall, then winter.