Classic Poem

There are those for whom it is as if they had gone
and established through measurement the path of the red sun,
the pace of movement of that sun and the sphere of the earth
around which the sun moves and the directions through which
move the waves of the wind and space that rests on nothing,
and they can describe exactly how these things always are!
Yet even the knowledge that knows all of this cannot know
you! because you make no outward show of yourself! Your strength
is hidden, like the stone missile an elephant may carry in its cheek!
So how can poets, through song, reveal who you really are?
O you have a country where many precious things that come
by sea are unloaded by lowly laborers onto great roads
near their own lands, out of great ships that have entered
the harbor without any need to lower
their masts or their soaring sails or to lighten their cargo!