National Poetry Month - Listening

Jeff submitted this as one of his favorite poems. It's by William Stafford:

Listening


My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.

--
This poem is from the book The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, published by Graywolf Press in 1999. Buy the book here.