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New Collected Poems QUOTES

New Collected Poems QUOTES

1 " At start of spring I open a trench
In the ground. I put into it
The winter’s accumulation of paper,
Pages I do not want to read
Again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the suns, growth of the ground,
Finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise,
have been inattentive to wonders,
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse,
of mind and body, I close the trench
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new. "

― Wendell Berry , New Collected Poems

2 " When the mind’s an empty room The clear days come. "

― Wendell Berry , New Collected Poems

3 " THE ARRIVAL Like a tide it comes in, wave after wave of foliage and fruit, the nurtured and the wild, out of the light to this shore. In its extravagance we shape the strenuous outline of enough. "

― Wendell Berry , New Collected Poems

4 " The Wish to be Generous"

ALL that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass. "

― Wendell Berry , New Collected Poems

5 " A MUSIC I employ the blind mandolin player in the tunnel of the Métro. I pay him a coin as hard as his notes, and maybe he has employed me, and pays me with his playing to hear him play. Maybe we’re necessary to each other, and this vacant place has need of us both —it’s vacant, I mean, of dwellers, is populated by passages and absences. By some fate or knack he has chosen to place his music in this cavity where there’s nothing to look at and blindness costs him nothing. Nothing was here before he came. His music goes out among the sounds of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance and meaning of what he plays. It’s his music, not the place, I go by. In this light which is just a fact, like darkness or the edge or end of what you may be going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up his mandolin, the lantern of his world; his fingers make their pattern on the wires. This is not the pursuing rhythm of a blind cane pecking in the sun, but is a singing in a dark place. "

― Wendell Berry , New Collected Poems