Swidden: a temporary agricultural plot formed by cutting back and burning off vegetative cover.

From Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

A child said, what is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?...I do not know what it is any more than he
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They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
and if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward...and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.