Looking for a Poem to Signify Our Beginning

I teach. I teach tomorrow.
One hundred and twenty teenagers, high school juniors,
spread across five American literature classes.

Every year I search for the poem, the prose passage, the song,
to start the year with, to signify our beginning together, to point toward a place we will co-create.
I didn't find the song. Hmm...
Lots of possibilities, but no match of intensity with immediacy, depth with a clear surface.

I didn't find the prose passage. I didn't look far.

I didn't find the poem. I didn't find the poem for hours.

Robert Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" came close.
John Haines' "The Stone Harp" came close.
Poems by Bob Perelman (from Primer and Captive Audience) came close. I considered reading his "Confession" again (from The Future of Memory), a poem students past found compelling, odd, quirky, not what they expected from a poem.
I thought about reading James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."
I combed through America a Prophecy, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha. I sifted through other Rothenberg anthologies: Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin.
I leafed through books by Allen Ginsberg (a consistent student favorite), Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Robert Bly (would teeth and fur fly if those two knew they were juxtaposed?), Gary Snyder, read poems by Denise Levertov, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, Walt Whitman... I read dozens of poems looking for the poem that not only said "poem," but said, hey, this class has the openness of a poem, the thoughtfulness, the breath, the breadth in brief (I long ago realized I can't teach everything to everybody).

I settled on this, "I go among trees and sit still," the first poem in Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir:

I go among tree and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.