Poetry at Eastertide: Wendell Berry

This week...as perilous times continue and Spring struggles to take hold in Central Alberta... an offering from American poet, Wendell Berry:


The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a gime
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, paperback, 1999.


To listen to the poet reading this work, visit On Being at THIS LINK.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; 

or about your body, what you will wear.

 Is not life more important than food, and the body more than clothes? 

 Look at the birds of the air; 

they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, 

and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. 

 Are you not much more valuable than they? 

 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

 -- Jesus, the Christ, Matthew 6: 25-27