Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929 - 2018

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/23/580109007/ursula-le-guin-whose-novels-plucked-truth-from-high-fantasy-dies-at-88

Ursula K. Le Guin: Bright the hawk's flight

People have been quoting some of their favorite bits of Le Guin's works. I'd like to do so as well . This is a poem from Always Coming Home. That book is arranged as a series of memoirs, articles, poems, songs, prayers, stories, recipes, and more from a people who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California."

On Second Hill
by Ire of Sinshan.

Whenever I come to this place
always somebody
always somebody
has been walking here
has walked here before me.

The trails in the grass are thin and crooked
hard to follow, leading
to the sacred of this place.
The flicker knocks the oak
five times, four times.

Who came here
before me, before sunrise?
Before the flicker?
Whose paths?

Their feet are narrow and divided,
their legs slender.
They walk
in a sacred manner.

And from A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book by her I ever read, when I was eleven:

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.