A Lovely Little Poem

i stumbled upon this wonderful poem a few days ago in an old New Yorker.

Before Air-Conditioning

The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!
The wind is wiggling the trees.
The sky is black.  The trees deep green.
The man mowing the enormous lawn before it rains makes goodness clean.
It's the smell of laundry on the line
And the smell of the sea, brisk iodine,
Nine hundred miles inland from the ocean, it's that smell.
It makes someone little who has a fever feel almost well.
It's exactly what a sick person needs to eat.
Maybe it's coming from Illinois in the heat.
Watch out for the crows, though.
With them around, caw, caw, it's going to snow.
I think I'm still asleep.  I hope I said my prayers before I died.
I hear the milkman setting the clinking bottles down outside.

--Fredrick Seidel