The Loved Ones

"The Loved Ones"  

Wendell Berry 

The loved ones we call the dead 

depart from us and for a while 

are absent. And then as if 

called back by our love, they come 

near us again. They enter our dreams. 

We feel they have been near us 

when we have not thought of them. 

They are simply here, simply waiting 

while we are distracted among 

our obligations. At last 

it comes to us: They live now 

in the permanent world. 

We are the absent ones. 

A Warning to My Readers

"A Warning to My Readers" 

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. 

IMAGE: Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man (1845) 

How to Be a Poet

"How to Be a Poet" 

Wendell Berry 

(to remind myself) 

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came. 

IMAGE: Edvard Munch, Inger on the Beach (1889) 

Like the Water

"Like the Water" 

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. 

IMAGE by Marc Adamus 

When . . .

To Think of the Life of a Man

"To Think of the Life of a Man" 

Wendell Berry

In a time that breaks
in cutting pieces all around,
when men, voiceless
against thing-ridden men,
set themselves on fire, it seems
too difficult and rare
to think of the life of a man
grown whole in the world,
at peace and in place.
But having thought of it
I am beyond the time
I might have sold my hands
or sold my voice and mind
to the arguments of power
that go blind against
what they would destroy. 

I leave all that behind. 

Dust

"Dust" 

Wendell Berry 

The dust motes float
and swerve in the sunbeam,
as lively as worlds,
and I remember my brother
saying, when we were boys,
"We may be living on an atom
in somebody's wallpaper." 

A Meeting

The Silence

"The Silence" 

Wendell Berry

Though the air is full of singing 
my head is loud 
with the labor of words. 

Though the season is rich 
with fruit, my tongue 
hungers for the sweet of speech. 

Though the beech is golden 
I cannot stand beside it 
mute, but must say 

"It is golden," while the leaves 
stir and fall with a sound 
that is not a name. 

It is in the silence 
that my hope is, and my aim. 
A song whose lines 

I cannot make or sing 
sounds men's silence 
like a root. Let me say 

and not mourn: the world 
lives in the death of speech 
and sings there. 

The Real Work

"The Real Work" 

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. 

Testament

"Testament"  

Wendell Berry 

And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass . . .

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death—
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice. 

IMAGE: Dave Gordon, Old Gravestones II (2013)

The Dead Calf

"The Dead Calf" 

Wendell Berry 

Dead at the pasture edge,
his head is without eyes, becalmed
on the grass. There was no escaping
the heaviness that came on him,
the darkness that rose
under his belly as though he stood
in a black sucking pool.
Earth’s weight grew in him,
and he lay down. As he died
a great bird took his eyes.

Where is the horror in it?
Not in him, for he came to it
as a shadow into the night.
It was nameless and familiar.
He was fitted to it. In me
is where the horror is. In my mind
he does not yield. I cannot believe
the deep peace that has come to him.
I am afraid that where the light
is torn there is a wound.
There is a darkness in the soul
that loves the eyes. There is a light
in the mind that sees only light
and will not enter the darkness.

But I would have a darkness
in my mind like the dark
the dead calf makes for a time
on the grass where he lies, and will make
in the earth as he is carried down.
May all dead things lie down in me
and be at peace, as in the ground. 

IMAGE: Sidney Nolan, Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt II) (1952) 

The Hidden Singer

"The Hidden Singer" 

Wendell Berry

The gods are less for their love of praise.  
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing  
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.  
It has made all things by dividing itself.  
It will be whole again.  
To its joy we come together— 
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,  
the lover and the loved.  
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,  
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,  
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves  
who sings quietly and waits, and sings. 

In This World

"In This World" 

Wendell Berry 

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other. 

IMAGE: Robert S. Duncanson, Valley Pasture (1857) 

Grace

"Grace"

Wendell Berry

The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.” 

Woods

"Woods"

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. 

The Wild Geese

"The Wild Geese" 

Wendell Berry 

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
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. 

The Wish to Be Generous

 

 

Do Not Be Ashamed

"Do Not Be Ashamed"

Wendell Berry

  

You will be walking some night

in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness,
and they will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will rise
in his evening flight from the hilltop.

Whatever Happens

"Whatever Happens"

Wendell Berry