Quote of the moment

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 time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry: The Peace or the Wild Things

Oct 21, 2009

Wood

Tree grew in the land
Place in far distant time
Rooted deep holding strong
Ignoring the clock chime

Defying storm and age
Chose not to leave at doom call
Tree cared not rules of span
Declined even the leaf fall

Imposed will against the force
While nature declared the crime
Continued in field of life to stand
Ignoring as the clocks chime

World changes with upheaval
Tempest came and turmoil
Ages slipped into the past,
Life returned to dust, to soil

Still that tree remained
While all that had been faded
Life long since was gone
To departure not persuaded

No longer standing upright
Still claiming the space
A throne to call its own
Forever to claim that place

A love of deep in the heart
A vow of how long to last
To show what would be
He called upon the past

Selecting for than ancient
A rock from wood long ago
Shared it with one adored
To profess that all would know

That fragment of a tree
Seeming to have been forever
To be matched by the time
Ere his love would sever



And it still endures true
To words without repent
Though ‘twas but a stone
Trivial to whom it was sent

So cast aside again
To now endure alone
Promise being a trifle
Without worth, mere stone.



G - Oct 2009

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