Only a little distance

Am reading the Financial Times, which is the hotel's choice for an English-language paper, and they reviewed Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, the recent collection of Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected poems. And I thought the quoted extract from "Good-Bye", on the sadness of departure, featured very precisely chosen, exquisite words:
You are leaving the earth
but only a little distance
... but just that much is hard to do,
it has cost other people centuries of effort
and is costing us centuries of grief

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