“The Wilderness” by W.S. Merwin

Remoteness is its own secret. Not holiness,
Though, nor the huge spirit miraculously avoiding
The way’s dissemblings, and undue distraction or drowning
At the watercourse, has found us this place,

But merely surviving all that is not here,
Till the moment that looks up, almost by chance, and sees
Perhaps hand, feet, but not ourselves; a few stunted juniper trees
And the horizon’s virginity. We are where we always were.

The secret becomes no less itself for our presence
In the midst of it; as the lizard’s gold-eyed
Mystery is no more lucid for being near.

And famine is all about us, but not here;
For from the very hunger to look, we feed
Unawares, as at the beaks of ravens.