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by
Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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by
Wendell Berry
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes.
Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here.
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear.
What we need is here.
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by
Wendell Berry
Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come.
How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.
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by
Wendell Berry
Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,
and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.
We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth of its joy.
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by
Wendell Berry
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
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by
Wendell Berry
Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found
the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,
frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air
held or moved them as it stood or moved.
The ground that slept beneath us woke in them
and made a music of the light, as it had waked
and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,
and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair
for all that time.
Does my land have the health
of this, where nothing falls but into life?
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by
Wendell Berry
In a dream I meet
my dead friend.
He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.
"
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by
Wendell Berry
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world.
I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies.
That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
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