Excerpt from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid

"...Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird. The widest door is the least liable to
intrusion,
Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and I know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far
longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on the Earth.
I too lying here have dismissed all else.
Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,
From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight
Is the naked sun which is for no man's sight.
I would scorn to cry to any easier audience
Or, having cried, lack patience to await the response.

from Collected Poems, Vol. 1, pp. 423-4
and quoted in the chapter on MacDiarmid in Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry'