Somewhere Different Now

It's time to share another poem!  This one comes from Wendell Berry, whose work I first learned about in a college course called Religion and the Environment.  When not writing poems, essays, or fiction, Berry is a farmer in his native Kentucky, using sustainable techniques to live his values of living closely with the Earth and treating it well.  I have a collection of his poetry called A Timbered Choir:  The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.  I've read this book very slowly over nearly three years because I prefer to take it with me outside and savor a poem or two at a time in some quiet place. The poetry is unpretentious but elegantly crafted and heartfelt:  poems to meditate upon more than to dissect.  He writes about nature, humankind's distance from and destruction of the environment, love, the value of good work balanced by a time of rest, God, death, and the connections between all of these topics.  This one, however, I love for the reasons it gives for writing as well as the sense of peace of moving beyond words. 

"1994:  VII"

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue.  Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret.  To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.