When it is over

When it is over—for it will be over,
Though we who watched it be gone, watched it and with it died—
Will there be none the less the yellow melilot, the white, the high sweet clover,
Close to the dusty, fragrant, hot roadside?
Oh, yes, there will!—
Escaped from fields of fodder, for there must be fodder still. . . .

Ah, yes, but nothing will escape ...

Yet sweet, perhaps, in fields of fodder still.

When it is over—for it will be over—
Will there be none the less, will there be still
In April on the southern slope of an orchard, apple orchard hill,
Red-and-white buds already fragrant, intent upon blossoming?—
There will; I know there will.

But for whom will they blossom?—
They will blossom for what, not whom,
I think—the streakèd bloom
Red-and-white, and the hardy fragrance, strong, all but visible, almost but not quite in sight,
Long, long before its pretty petals in a May wind fall,
Will be the finished apple in the eyes of all beholding it;

I see him well: the human creature studying the only good
A tree can be—stout wood
For building or for pulp whereon to print the expedient thing,
Or, if not that, food.
He walks through the apple orchard just now blossoming,
Dismissing to the necessary, the developing, past
The present beauty and the fragrance enfolding it.