Home > Work > A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997
1 " Sabbaths, 1982—IV (“A gardener rises out of the ground”)Thrush song, stream song, holy loveThat flows through earthly forms and folds,The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshedIn throat and ear, in stream and stone,A grace living here as we live,Move my mind now to that which holdsThings as they change. The warmth has come.The doors have opened. Flower and songEmbroider ground and air, lead meBeside the healing field that waits;Growth, death, and a restoring formOf human use will make it well.But I go on, beyond, higherIn the hill’s fold, forget the timeI come from and go to, recallThis grove left out of all account,A place enclosed in song. DesignNow falls from thought. I go amazedInto the maze of a designThat mind can follow but not know,Apparent, plain, and yet unknown,The outline lost in earth and sky.What form wakens and rumples this?Be still. A man who seems to beA gardener rises out of the ground,Stands like a tree, shakes off the dark,The bluebells opening at his feet,The light a figured cloth of song. "
― Wendell Berry , A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997
2 " Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners plannedat blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factorieswhere the machines were made that would drive ever forwardtoward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I sawthe poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.I saw the passages worn by the unnumberedfootfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monumentsof those who had died in pursuit of the objectiveand who had long ago forever been forgotten, accordingto the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forgetthat they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objectiveas if nobody ever had pursued it before.The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now freeto sell themselves to the highest bidderand to enter the best paying prisonsin pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,to the completed sale, to the signatureon the contract, which was to clear the wayto self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go homewould ever get there now, for every remembered placehad been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.Every place had been displaced, every loveunloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeantto make way for the passage of the crowdof the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homelesswith their many eyes opened toward the objectivewhich they did not yet perceive in the far distance,having never known where they were going,having never known where they came from. "