The Orchard – by Mary Oliver

I have dreamed
of accomplishment.
I have fed

ambition.
I have traded
nights of sleep

for a length of work.
Lo, and I have discovered
how soft bloom

turns to green fruit,
which turns to sweet fruit.
Lo, and I have discovered

all winds blow cold
at last,
and the leaves,

so pretty, so many,
vanish
in the great, black

packet of time,
in the great, black
packet of ambition,

and the ripeness
of the apple
is its downfall.

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—And that was why it whispered and did not speak.It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weakTo the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Mowing, by Robert Frost

Bears

 Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head and trunk. They have nice snouts and small eyes. They like greediness very much. They don't want to go to school, but sleeping in the forest -- that, yes, very much. When they don't have any honey, they clutch their heads in their hands and are so sad, so sad, that I don't know. Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes.

Bears, from Zbigniew Herbert's Elegy for the Departure.