Wind Song
Wind Song - meaning Summary
Learning from the Orchard Wind
The speaker recalls learning to sleep and listen in an old apple orchard where the wind is personified as counting and throwing away its money. Nature becomes a teacher: the wind’s whistles and questions imprint a lesson in forgetfulness, attentive listening, and the rhythms of day and night. The poem frames sleep and memory as linked practices learned from the landscape’s sounds and from a childhood moment of rest.
Read Complete AnalysesLONG ago I learned how to sleep, In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away, In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all, In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, 'Who, who are you?' I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson. There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds. Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine, Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars: Who, who are you? Who can ever forget listening to the wind go by counting its money and throwing it away?
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