(After Wendell Berry)
Whose life is worth leaving
potatoes to dissolve back to soil
or keeping half eaten Seckel pears
from the arms of our children
eager for the snowballs of winter?
Why leave the earth’s breast engorged
for a nipple of latex or silicone?
I have seen the brimming white fields
and I have seen us feed the gulping
mouths of machines and the milk
as it runs down their faces
and into the streets to turn black
under rubber wheels.
“From dust
to dust,”
- it was a blessing.
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The Peace of Wild Things
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.
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