Let Evening Come, a poem by Jane Kenyon.

Post 498 - Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1947, Jane Kenyon spent her first two decades in the Midwest, attending the University of Michigan in her hometown through completion of her master's degree in 1972. It was while she was a student there that Kenyon met her future husband, the poet Donald Hall. After her marriage, Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, a New Hampshire farm that had been in Hall's family for generations and where she would spend the remainder of her life before her untimely death from cancer at age forty-seven in 1995.

About this poem, she said, "I went upstairs one day with the purpose of writing something redeeming, which is not the way to write, but this just fell out. I didn't have to struggle with it." It's my favorite poem of hers.

Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.