This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

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.