On a grading break

Needing to read something well-written after several devastatingly bad student essays, I turned to my blog addictions and found an Oliver Wendell Berry poem at Pages Turned.
The essays are all about sustainability- or meant to be, anyway- and this poem dovetails nicely as you can see from these two stanzas from the middle of the poem:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.