This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. This wonderful book of poems by a remarkable poet is my companion on the back deck in the mornings. Wendell Berry is teaching me to pay attention to the land, to country, to Creation, and I am left humbled and speechless by both his words and my surroundings. Wendell Berry is currently 91 years old – a farmer, writer, acvitist and ‘cultural critic’ who lives, learns and loves on and from the land. In the US he is considered a national treasure.
This particulat book is a collection of poems on the theme of Sabbath, and it is almost worth it for the introduction itself. I am currently stuck in a good way in the first half dozen pages and poems. At nearly 400 pages, the book is a treasure trove of wisdom, even in the shortest of works.
There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have ther quiet.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Berry’s gift is in observation, and his work has both a particularity of place, yet also a universal wisdom. He writes not simply as a spectator but also as a wordker of the land and its inhabitant – decades in the one place. His invitation is to deeply know and be deeply known by Creation. These are relfections on blossom and decay, effort and rest, order and wildness, pattern and rhythm, suffused with the sensual and the spiiritual, not side by side but as one. You cannot read of his place without learning to attending to your own.
Perhaps such poems are not for everyone, but personally I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Sabbath Poem I (1979)
by Wendell Berry
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
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.