This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

I am an amateur poet, working for the love of the work and to my own satisfaction—which are two of the conditions of “self-employment,” as I understand it. I belong to no school of poetry, but rather to my love for certain poems by other poets, some of whom, I am thankful to say, are my contemporaries.

The condition of the people is indistinguishable ultimately from the condition of the land. Work that destroys the land, diminishing its ability to support life, is a great evil for which sooner or later the punishment is homelessness, hunger, and thirst. For some, the context of this thinking has shifted from religion to science, but the understanding of the land as a conditional gift has not changed.

Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures.

Nature’s damages are followed by her healings, though not necessarily on a human schedule or in human time.

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

To rest, we must accept Nature’s limits and our own. When we come to our limit, we must be still.

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

As for “wild,” I now think the word is misused. The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as “wild.” They plainly are going about their own domestic lives, finding or making shelter, gathering food, minding their health, raising their young, always well-adapted to their places. They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and that they are right. We are the ones who are undomesticated, barbarous, unrestrained, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control. They are our natural teachers, and we have learned too little from them.

the river is a place passing through a passing place.

Great deathly powers have passed: The black and bitter cold, the wind That broke and felled strong trees, the rind Of ice that held at last Even the fleshly heart In cold that made it seem a stone. And now there comes again the one First Sabbath light, the Art That unruled, uninvoked, Unknown, makes new again and heals, Restores heart’s flesh so that it feels Anew the old deadlocked Goodness of its true home That it will lose again and mourn, Remembering the year reborn In almost perfect bloom In almost shadeless wood, Sweet air that neither burned nor chilled In which the tenderest flowers prevailed, The light made flesh and blood.

Renewal. Rebirth. Hope. Spring. Resurrection.

There are two healings: nature’s, and ours and nature’s. Nature’s will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature’s will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

We have ourselves to fear. We burn the world to live; Our living blights the leaf.

Receiving sun and giving shade, Their life’s a benefaction made, And is a benediction said Over the living and the dead.

I like the play between the words “benefaction” and “benediction”

It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it? It is our own bodies that we give to be broken, our bodies existing before and after us in clod and cloud, worm and tree, that we, driving or driven, despise in our greed to live, our haste to die. To have lost, wantonly, the ancient forests, the vast grasslands is our madness, the presence in our very bodies of our grief.

In early morning we awaken from The sound of engines running in the night, And then we start the engines of the day. We speed away into the fading light. Nowhere is any sound but of our going On roads strung everywhere with humming wire. Nowhere is there an end except in smoke. This is the world that we have set on fire. This is the promised burning, darkening Our light of hope and putting out the sun, Blighting the leaf, the stream—and blesséd are The dead who died before this time began. Blesséd the dead who have escaped in time The twisted metal and the fractured stone, The technobodies of the hopeless cure. Now, to the living, only grief has shown The little yellow of the violet Risen again out of the dead year’s leaves, And grief alone is measure of the love That only lives by rising out of graves.

This is pretty bleak.

A moment in time thinking about Time

This is a nation where No lovely thing can last.

Feeling this right now too.

We have all had moments that we wish could last forever

Worked and manured, prepared For spring, put out of mind, You must saw, split, bring in, And store your winter wood. And thus the year comes round.

In the days of our ancestors, poetry, rhyme and song was used to teach each new generation the ways of of a profession. This could be a primer for some future farmer; it’s also a creed for Berry’s profession and life now.

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man’s legs.

True words

1995 I A man with some authentic worries And many vain and silly ones, I am well-schooled in sleeplessness; I know it from the inside out. I breathe, and I know what’s at stake. But still sometimes I’m sane and sound, However heart or head may ache; I go to sleep when I lie down. With no determined care to breathe, I breathe and live and sleep and take A sabbath from my weariness. I rest in an unasking trust Like clouds and ponds and stones and trees. The long-arising Day will break If I should die before I wake.

Best of any song is bird song in the quiet, but first you must have the quiet.

I read this several times. Struck me

There is a place you can go where you are quiet, a place of water and the light on the water. Trees are there, leaves, and the light on leaves moved by air. Birds, singing, move among leaves, in leaf shadow.

This sounds like a delightful place

What I fear most is despair for the world and us: forever less of beauty, silence, open air, gratitude, unbidden happiness, affection, unegotistical desire.

I’m reading this after a night filled with protests about an ugly, violent murder that turned ugly and violent, after a week or two of uncertainty and suspicion and fear and tearing apart, after several months of disease, after years of authoritarianism and Trumpism and hopelessness, after decades of accelerating climate change including a mega drought were I live: despair is hard to avoid.

The house is cold at dawn. I wake and build the fires. The ground is white with snow. Snow whitens every tree. No wind has touched the woods. The deer stand still and look.

This is a beautiful snapshot

We follow the dead to their graves, and our long love follows on beyond, crying to them, not “Come back!” but merely “Wait!”

This is so true. Achingly so

A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind. Nightmares Inhabit it, and daily evidence Of the clean country smeared for want of sense, Of freedom slack and dull among the free, Of faith subsumed in idiot luxury, And beauty beggared in the marketplace, And clear-eyed wisdom bleary with dispraise.

Harsh

All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be, is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty to say so and to oppose. What else have we to live for?

Kind of fitting to stumble across this almost 20 year old poem now. Written for a different time but still relevant.

If we have become a people incapable of thought, then the brute-thought of mere power and mere greed will think for us. If we have become incapable of denying ourselves anything, then all that we have will be taken from us. If we have no compassion, we will suffer alone, we will suffer alone the destruction of ourselves. These are merely the laws of this world as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton: When we cease from human thought, a low and effective cunning stirs in the most inhuman minds.

Prescient

I am hardly an ornithologist, nevertheless I live among the birds and on the best days my mind is with them, partaking of their nature which is earthly and airy.

This is what I long to be

Forgive this fragmentary life.

And what was bright turns dull.

Industrial humanity, an alien species, lives by death.

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.

No place at last is better than the world. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.

For in so failing I learned something of my place, something of myself, and now I welcome back the trees.

As if suddenly, little towns where people once lived all their lives in the same houses now fill with strangers who don’t bother to speak or wave. Life is a lonely business. Gloss it how you will, plaster it over with politic bullshit as you please, ours has been a brutal history, punishing without regret whatever or whomever belonged or threatened to belong in place, converting the land to poverty and money any way that was quickest.

And on... so sad and so true.

We forget the land we stand on and live from. We set ourselves free in an economy founded on nothing, on greed verified by fantasy, on which we entirely depend.

This is definitely a theme that runs through his poetry, especially his later poems. His anger and hopelessness for this world ring like a struck bell.

How little I know in my widest waking, held here by the making of days, days of work, days, fewer, of rest, suffering myself to be made by days that cannot be helped or changed or stopped, and so I wait to be changed by work, by rest, by what I know into what I know not.

How did he know me?

The need comes on me now to speak across the years to those who finally will live here after the present ruin, in the absence of most of my kind who by now are dead, or have given their minds to machines and become strange, “over-qualified” for the hard handwork that must be done to remake, so far as humans can remake, all that humans have unmade. To you, whoever you may be, I say: Come, meaning to stay. Come, willing to learn what this place, like no other, will ask of you and your children, if you mean to stay. “This land responds to good treatment,” I heard my father say time and again in his passion to renew, to make whole, what ill use had broken. And so to you, whose lives taken from the life of this place I cannot foretell, I say: Come, and treat it well.

There is no hope?

The river flows soundlessly by at the speed of its own long time.

Love this

Give thanks to the quiet.

There is so little quiet anywhere, anymore.

despite the stern demands of scientist and realist,

I feel this way too

Once there was nothing, not even darkness, not even silence, not even nothing. Think of that.

A meditation

If tonight the world ends, we’ll have had this day.

Appreciate creation