The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry - Wendell Berry

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Watch with Me

       The Wild Birds

       A World Lost

      POETRY

       The Broken Ground

       Clearing

       Collected Poems: 1957 - 1982

       The Country of Marriage

       Entries

       Farming: A Hand Book

       Findings

       Openings

       A Part

       Sabbaths

       Sayings and Doings

       A Timbered Choir

       Traveling at Home (with prose)

       The Wheel

      ESSAYS

       Another Turn of the Crank

       A Continuous Harmony

       The Gift of Good Land

       Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

       The Hidden Wound

       Home Economics

       Recollected Essays: 1954 - 1980

       Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

       Standing by Words

       The Unforeseen Wilderness

       The Unsettling of America

       What Are People For?

      For Jack Shoemaker

       AUTHOR’S NOTE

      I like the idea of a volume of “selected poems” because I like the ideas of culling and condensation and compactness. In making this book, I have culled a lot of poems and thus have achieved some condensation as a matter of course. I might have achieved compactness as well, if I had had the foresight and the good luck to write shorter poems. Having so often failed at brevity, and needing to represent my work at least adequately, I have had to sacrifice compactness in the interest of fairness to myself.

      This selection contains none of the poems recently collected in A Timbered Choir. To have included work from that book would have made this one too large, and would have introduced the problem of representing adequately a distinct body of work.

      W. B.

      In a time that breaks in cutting pieces all around, when men, voiceless against thing-ridden men, set themselves on fire, it seems too difficult and rare to think of the life of a man grown whole in the world, at peace and in place. But having thought of it I am beyond the time I might have sold my hands or sold my voice and mind to the arguments of power that go blind against what they would destroy.

      from The Broken Ground

       for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon

      In the essential prose

      of things, the apple tree

      stands up, emphatic

      among the accidents

      of the afternoon, solvent,

      not to be denied.

      The grass has been cut

      down, carefully

      to leave the orange

      poppies still in bloom;

      the tree stands up

      in the odor of the grass

      drying. The forked

      trunk and branches are

      also a kind of necessary

      prose—shingled with leaves,

      pigment and song

      imposed on the blunt

      lineaments of fact, a foliage

      of small birds among them.

      The tree lifts itself up

      in the garden, the

      clutter of its green

      leaves halving the light,

      stating the unalterable

      congruity and form

      of its casual growth;

      the crimson finches appear

      and disappear, singing

      among the design.

      In the empty lot—a place

      not natural, but wild—among

      the trash of human absence,

      the slough and shamble

      of the city’s seasons, a few

      old locusts bloom.

      A few woods birds

      fly and sing

      in the new foliage

      —warblers and tanagers, birds

      wild as leaves; in a million

      each one would be rare,

      new to the eyes. A man

      couldn’t make a habit

      of such color,

      such flight and singing.

      But they are the habit of this

      wasted place. In them

      the ground is wise. They are

      its remembrance of what it is.

      My old friend, the owner

      of a new boat, stops by

      to ask me to fish with him,

      and I say I will—both of us

      knowing that we may never

      get around to it, it may be

      years before we’re both

      idle again on the same day.

      But we make a plan, anyhow,

      in honor of friendship

      and the fine spring weather

      and the new boat

      and our sudden thought

      of the water shining

      under the morning fog.

      The opening out and out,

      body

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