now the heart must break at evening

...It is a strange thing now
To feel how restlessly the bones live out
Unfinished life. Here in the valley where
The lithe creek writhes through fields made doubly fertile
With earth's most nourishing and nervous rain
That fell from us into the eager ground,
The blue-smocked peasants reap the grain with scythes
Whose strokes cut through me here, remembering
The Colorado plain and the long wheat.
So like our fathers in the windy West
We found a patch of land and paid our life.
Yet the rain's taste is like American rain
And from this little distance under earth
The sun is no more angry and the moon
Moves through its phases in no other way
Than when it climbed along the Rockies' edge
And dropped into the prairie. if a man
Must take his little dreaming under earth
Where idiot day can no more mock it, shrieking
Its violent laughter of the livid light,
This valley is as good a place as any,
But now the heart must break at evening
Hearing the homeward children on the road
Shouting the words he cannot understand,
The little scraps of song, the running games,
And birds whose crying is a stranger thing.
Yet here deep under is my doom. I take it.

Paul Engle, "Belleau Wood"