Given

by Wendell Berry

and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

SPRING HAIKU

What wonder have you done to me? In binding love you set me free.

We are the you and I who were they whom we remember.

All bend in one wind.

Light and wind are running over the headed grass as though the hill had melted and now flowed.

WHY Why all the embarrassment about being happy? Sometimes I’m as happy as a sleeping dog, and for the same reasons, and for others.

THE REJECTED HUSBAND

THE INLET

Where I stood, seeing and knowing, was time, where we die of grief. And surely the bright street of my dream, in which we saw again our old friend as a boy clear-eyed in innocence of his death, was some quickly-crossed small inlet of eternity.

HOW TO BE A POET (to remind myself )

more of each than you have

Any readers who like your work, doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

SEVENTY YEARS Well, anyhow, I am not going to die young.

THE LEADER Head like a big watermelon, frequently thumped and still not ripe.

THE FUTURE

I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.

A rich thief is a thief.

Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace.

Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this “progress.” So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

I don’t like machines, which are neither mortal nor immortal, though I am constrained to use them.

When I see an airplane fuming through the once-pure sky or a vehicle of the outer space with its little inner space imitating a star at night, I say, “Get out of there!” as I would speak to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.

I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

loves that are leaving the world like the colors of extinct birds, like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals, every one truly what it is: gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made of light and luminous within itself. They know (better than we do) how to live in the places where they live. And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader—a choice not altogether possible now.

There ain’t no harm in them. There wasn’t but little, if any, in them when they were living on this earth, and there’s not any in them now.

It is better, granting imperfection in both ways, to be imperfect and together than to be imperfect and alone.

PRODUCTION NOTE: The left side of Harlan’s face and the right side of Anna’s are made up to appear old. The opposite sides of their faces should denote, not youth, but the youthful maturity of a couple in their forties—faces lovely because they are lovely to one another.

it is like God’s love or sorrow, including at last all that had been left out.

By expenditure of hope, Intelligence, and work, You think you have it fixed. It is unfixed by rule. Within the darkness, all Is being changed, and you Also will be changed.

I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will.

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.

Grace Unasked, merely allowed,

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go.

And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which even I may step forth from my self and be free.

But what he vowed to keep Even his keeping changed And, changing, led him far Beyond what they or he Foresaw, and made him strange.

We hear way off approaching sounds Of rain on leaves and on the river: O blessed rain, bring up the grass To the tongues of the hungry cattle.

I stand and wait for light To open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer To come and find me here.

An old man’s mind is a graveyard where the dead arise.

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.

Ask the world to reveal its quietude— not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.

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.

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.

We come at last to the dark and enter in. We are given bodies newly made out of their absence from one another in the light of the ordinary day. We come to the space between ourselves, the narrow doorway, and pass through into the land of the wholly loved.

The year is changing. The summer’s young are grown and strong in flight. Soon now it will be fall. The frost will come. To one who has watched here many years, all of this is familiar. And yet none of it has ever happened before as it is happening now.

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