This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

What stood will stand, though all be fallen, The good return that time has stolen. Though creatures groan in misery, Their flesh prefigures liberty To end travail and bring to birth Their new perfection in new earth. At word of that enlivening Let the trees of the woods all sing And every field rejoice, let praise Rise up out of the ground like grass. What stood, whole in every piecemeal Thing that stood, will stand though all Fall—field and woods and all in them Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.

When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme That stirs in distant memory the whole First Sabbath’s song that no largess of time Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall. But harmony of earth is Heaven-made, Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer, A little song to keep us unafraid, An earthly music magnified in air.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap, Great work is done while we’re asleep. When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing,

We pray for vision, though we die, to see in our small imperfect love the Love of the ages of ages, whose green tree yet stands amid the flames.

And so I came to know The light borne in this world By Martin Rowanberry, Who knew no enemy, And yet was killed by hate. Beside the opened grave, The hillside white with snow, Hope makes its little song: “And we will see him in The morning over there.” The voices cease. And we Can do no more for him. The light he was returns Unto the Light that is.

Sleep is the prayer the body prays, Breathing in unthought faith the Breath That through our worry-wearied days Preserves our rest, and is our truth.

A man is lying on a bed in a small room in the dark. Weary and afraid, he prays for courage to sleep, to wake and work again; he doubts that waking when he wakes will recompense his sleep. His prayers lean upward on the dark and fall like flares from a catastrophe. He is a man breathing the fear of hopeless prayer, prayed in hope. He breathes the prayer of his fear that gives a light by which he sees only himself lying in the dark, a low mound asking almost nothing at all. And then, long yet before dawn, comes what he had not thought: love that causes him to stir like the dead in the grave, being remembered—his own love or Heaven’s, he does not know. But now it is all around him; it comes down upon him like a summer rain falling slowly, quietly in the dark.

There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.

Whatever happens, those who have learned to love one another have made their way into the lasting world and will not leave, whatever happens.

for this is Labor Day weekend, a time to celebrate with restlessness the possibility of rest always farther on.

Teach me patience beyond work and, beyond patience, the blest Sabbath of Thy unresting love which lights all things and gives rest.

The little stream sings in the crease of the hill. It is the water of life. It knows nothing of death, nothing. And this is the morning of Christ’s resurrection. The tomb is empty. There is no death. Death is our illusion, our wish to belong only to ourselves, which is our freedom to kill one another. From this sleep may we too rise, as out of the dark grave.

When freedom’s light goes out, let color drain from all paintings into gray puddles on the museum floor. When every ear awaits only the knock on the door in the dark midnight, let all the orchestras sound just one long note of woe.

His land—this meager sod, These stones, this low estate— Is the household of God. And it is Heaven’s gate.

know that I have life only insofar as I have love. I have no love except it come from Thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.

Out of charity let us pray for the great ones of politics and war, the intellectuals, scientists, and advisors, the golden industrialists, the CEOs, that they too may wake to a day without hope that in their smallness they may know the greatness of Earth and Heaven by which they so far live, that they may see themselves in their enemies, and from their great wants fallen know the small immortal joys of beasts and birds.

2008

After the bitter nights and the gray, cold days comes a bright afternoon.

O Thou who by Thy touch give form To all things and their polity, Whose sight is light to all, draw thanks From us as we draw breath from Thee.

He only can suppose the things of goodness, the most momentary, are in themselves so whole, so bright as to redeem the darkness and trouble of the world though we set it all afire. “Maybe,” the bookkeeper says. “Maybe.” For he knows that in a time gone mad for certainty, “maybe” gives room to live and move and be.

Let us not condemn the human beings self-appointed to serve machines, poor humans, so weak of mind, so self-misled, so willing to risk heroic wrong. What’s the satisfaction in condemning the self-condemned? Let them be answered by themselves who grow smaller, their great works uglier, more lethal, day by day. As we wish, ourselves, to be spared the fatal numbering, let us not confound offenders with offenses. May they come to mercy and to peace. But damn their bank accounts, inflated by the spent breath of all the earth, of species forever changed to money. Let their legal falsehoods, corpses

incorporated that cannot see or feel, think or care, that eat the world and shit money, fry in Hell in their own fat. May their incarnate steel and fire that destroy the mountains forever be damned. May the chemicals be damned that poison the rivers and damned too the alien slop and fume that spoil the air, the water, and all the living world, sold, soiled, or burned. May the plastic trash that defiles lands and oceans, the machines that destroy the work of human hands, the mind- destroying mechanical dreams be damned, completely damned. Be damned also to the incorporations of industrial war that is the triumph of every machine, that will destroy any life and every life, any place and every place, for victory that always is defeat. May the heartless

speech of machines that break the heart of the smallest wholeness, and may the radiant waste that has made geniuses idiots forever be damned. It’s poor religion that can’t provide a sufficient curse when needed, but if you condemn the dire shortcuts and devices of the engineers, confess that you condemn yourself. You too belong to that litter, and so must enter your guilty plea, and so must come to your work. You must go ahead in oppo...

You must live in the day as it passes, willing to let it go. You must set it free.