Both from Collected Poems, 1957-1982:
Awake at Night
Wendell Berry
Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
in my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth
again, and let the world go.
--------------------------------------
Let me wake in the night
and hear it raining
and go back to sleep.
XII in Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer
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Such wisdom within his words...
ReplyDeleteWisdom indeed. I like the idea of 'luxury' being looked at afresh here.
ReplyDeleteThanks, friends. SW, that bit--that one sentence--hadn't hit me, but now going back and reading again in the light of your comment.... Well, I now have more to ponder. :)
ReplyDeleteWhat you said about SW's comment is interesting to me because that's the one line I read over and over and over again until I finally "got" it.
ReplyDeleteThough the rest of the poem is wisdom as well, I think that line is the crux upon which it rests.
Val,
ReplyDeleteYou may be right. There are many layers and subtle nuances to Berry's work. Many times a poem of his will speak to me at some level immediately (even if I could not always immediately put into words why....), but there are things that I don't fully "get" until I have read it several times. And I almost always read Berry's poems several times. He is one of the few....
...the sturdiness and grace of necessary things... that would heal the earth, and heal men.
ReplyDeleteEvery cell in our being knows what these necessary things are. Why do we act like we haven't a clue?
Thank you for sharing this fw.
I am so going to have a hard time learning to lie still.
Flandrumhill,
ReplyDeleteWe live much of our lives "asleep" as it were, deluded and distracted from what is really at our core.
Pascal said in his "Pensees" that he had concluded that the source of all the world's problems was that people did not know how to sit still in their own rooms.
Hmmm.
Good luck in your endeavors to live these things out. And as Red Green would say, "Remember, I'm pullin' for ya; we're all in this together."
:)
This made this quote pop into my head, not sure exactly why:
ReplyDelete"Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless." ~John O'Donohue
"...the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things" has been ringing in my head since I read this. Time to reread some more Berry I think...thank you.
:-)
Amy,
ReplyDeleteO'Donohue is right on the mark with that one. Thanks.
Berry is one of only a few...who I pull off the shelf frequently and read parts of his work. He really keeps me grounded...
Happy rereading. :)
"one with the earth
ReplyDeleteagain, and let the world go."
We were once with the earth, then we turned away. The stronger the disconnection to the earth, the stronger we hold onto our "self." By coming back to the earth, again we return to our true self, the one that knows nothing about holding on and holding back.
I'm currently working on this very practice, called "Earth Descent." Incred.
Alice,
ReplyDeleteThat sounds quite interesting. I would love to know more about it.