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Public readings require us to be aware also that a poem can be a way of saying something of public interest in public: a way of making an argument, of declaring one’s allegiance, of taking a stand.
But though I am happy to think that poetry may be reclaiming its public life, I am equally happy to insist that poetry also has a private life that is more important to it and more necessary to us.
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.
In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations—other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of
my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.
To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.
The sabbath is the day, and the successive days honoring the day, when God rested after finishing the work of creation. This work was not finished, I think, in the sense of once and for all. It was finished by being given the power to exist and to continue,
We are to rest on the sabbath also, I have supposed, in order to understand that the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest. This work is entirely independent of our work, and is far more complex and wonderful than any work we have ever done or will ever do. It is more complex and wonderful than we will ever understand. From
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.
But how is a human being to come to rest in the presence of time, error, and mortality, in the midst of the demands of livelihood and civic responsibility, in knowing of all that human beings have done and are doing to damage the given world, and in knowing one’s own complicity in
Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures. Wind, flood, and fire are as much her means of world-making as birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans. Among
This quantitative endlessness, including also the idea of endless economic “growth,” is clearly different from the inexhaustibility of Nature on her terms, and of goodness, beauty, and truth
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.
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.
It is the story of eternity’s shining, much shadowed, much put off, in time. And time, however long, falls short.
After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.
The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.
What if, in the high, restful sanctuary That keeps the memory of Paradise, We’re followed by the drone of history And greed’s poisonous fumes still burn our eyes? Disharmony recalls us to our work. From Heavenly work of light and wind and leaf We must turn back into the peopled dark Of our unraveling century, the grief Of waste, the agony of haste and noise. It is a hard return from Sabbath rest To lifework of the fields, yet we rejoice, Returning, less condemned in being blessed
I go from the woods into the cleared field: A place no human made, a place unmade By human greed, and to be made again. Where centuries of leaves once built by dying A deathless potency of light and stone And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain, The growth of fifty thousand years undone In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock And clay—a “new land,” truly, that no race Was ever native to, but hungry mice And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns And thistles sent by generosity Of new beginning.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.
The warbler with its quivering striped throat Would live almost beyond my sight, Almost beyond belief, But for its double note— Among high leaves a leaf, At ease, at home in air and light.
A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood Who gave our rest a haven. Now fallen, they are given To labor and distress. These times we know much evil, little good To steady us in faith And comfort when our losses press Hard on us, and we choose, In panic or despair or both, To keep what we will lose.
So what was still and dark wakes up, Becomes intelligent, moves, names Itself by hunger and by kind, Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks, or sings. We all are praising, praying to The light we are, but cannot know.
The fume and shock and uproar of the internal combustion of America recede, the last vacationers gone back to the life that drives away from home. Bottles and wrappers of expensive cheap feasts ride the quieted current toward the Gulf of Mexico. And now the breeze comes down from the hill, the kingfisher returns to the dead limb of the sycamore, the swallows feed in the air over the water.
To light, and are at home. And Edward Abbey’s gone. I pass a cairn of stone Two arm-lengths long and wide Piled on the steep hillside By plowmen years ago. Now oaks and hickories grow Where the steel coulter passed. Where human striving ceased The Sabbath of the trees Returns and stands and is. The leaves shake in the wind. I think of that dead friend Here where he never came
He would have liked this place Where spring returns with solace Of bloom in a dark time, Larkspur and columbine. The flute song of the thrush Sounds in the underbrush.
Volleys of swallows leapt in joyous flight out of the dark into the brightening air in eternal gratitude for life before time not foreseen, and the song of the song sparrow rang in its bush.
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.
For we have given up Our sight to those in power And to machines, and now Are blind to all the world. This is a nation where No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast; The people leave the land; The land flows to the sea. Fine men and women die, The fine old houses fall, The fine old trees come down: Highway and shopping mall Still guarantee the right And liberty to be A peaceful murderer, A murderous worshipper, A slender glutton, or A healthy whore. Forgiving No enemy, forgiven By none, we live the death Of liberty, become What we have feared to be.
In this economy Where all we need is money To be well-stuffed and free By sufferance of our Lord, The Chairman of the Board. Because there’s thus no need, There is the greatest need To plant one’s ground with seed. Under the season’s sway, Against the best advice, In time of death and tears, In slow snowfall of years, Defiant and in hope, We keep an older way In light and breath to stay This household on its slope.
The seed is in the ground. Now may we rest in hope While darkness does its work.
And now this leaf lies brightly on the ground.
The best reward in going to the woods Is being lost to other people, and Lost sometimes to myself. I’m at the end Of no bespeaking wire to spoil my goods; I send no letter back I do not bring. Whoever wants me now must hunt me down
Best of any song is bird song in the quiet, but first you must have the quiet.
I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories where the machines were made that would drive ever forward toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley; I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city. I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.
I was wakened from my dream of the ruined world by the sound of rain falling slowly onto the dry earth of my place in time. On the parched garden, the cracked-open pastures, the dusty grape leaves, the brittled grass, the drooping foilage of the woods, fell still the quiet rain.
And I, walking in the first spring of her absence, know again her inextinguishable delight: the wild bluebells, the yellow celandine, violets purple and white, twinleaf, bloodroot, larkspur, the rue anemone light, light under the big trees, and overhead the redbud blooming, the redbird singing, the oak leaves like flowers still unfolding, and the blue sky.
So what is inward turns outward as does, we are told, the Kingdom of God. So we contain that which contains us. So the departed come to light.
Whatever happens, those who have learned to love one another have made their way into the lasting world and will not leave, whatever happens.
This is the time you’d like to stay. Not a leaf stirs. There is no sound. The fireflies lift light from the ground. You’ve shed the vanities of when And how and why, for now. And then The phone rings. You are called away.
By what blessedness do I weep?
The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
I stand and wait for light To open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer To come and find me here.
Surely it will be for this: the redbud pink, the wild plum white, yellow trout lilies in the morning light, the trees, the pastures turning green. On the river, quiet at daybreak, the reflections of the trees, as in another world, lie across from shore to shore. Yes, here is where they will come, the dead, when they rise from the grave.
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cézanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he’s alive forever, this instant, and may be.
After a mild winter the new lambs come in a March as wet, cold, and unforgiving as any I remember. Night freezes continue into April. But the brave birds risk a note of hope, and the bold little wood anemones lift their pretty blooms into the cold above the dead leaves. The sun grows slowly stronger. This Sabbath morning, I climb again to the high woods and sit down. Toward noon the wind loses its edge. Comfort comes. I eat, and then sleep
His is the voice of this deep place among the tiers of summer foliage where three streams come together. You sit and listen to the voice of the water, and then you hear the voice of the bird. He is saying to his mate, to himself, to any who may want to know: “I’m here!”
