- Joined
- Sep 27, 2005
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- 16,339
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- East O' The Sun & West O' The Moon
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- www.jlevitt.com
Every once in a while I run across a poem that touches me in the way that poetry is supposed to. I realize that feeling is personal; often a poem that moves one person deeply will have little effect on another.
But that special feeling that only poetry can provide, that moment of recognition and amazement and deep emotion is always worth sharing, in the hope that at least one other will feel that weird combination of elation and sadness, that frisson that comes upon one unawares.
And these days, it seems particularly appropriate to me.
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
But that special feeling that only poetry can provide, that moment of recognition and amazement and deep emotion is always worth sharing, in the hope that at least one other will feel that weird combination of elation and sadness, that frisson that comes upon one unawares.
And these days, it seems particularly appropriate to me.
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
