New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry Page A

silence
    that my hope is, and my aim.
    A song whose lines
    I cannot make or sing
    sounds men’s silence
    like a root. Let my say
    and not mourn: the world
    lives in the death of speech
    and sings there.

ANGER AGAINST BEASTS
    The hook of adrenaline shoves
    into the blood. Man’s will,
    long schooled to kill or have
    its way, would drive the beast
    against nature, transcend
    the impossible in simple fury.
    The blow falls like a dead seed.
    It is defeat, for beasts
    do not pardon, but heal or die
    in the absence of the past.
    The blow survives in the man.
    His triumph is a wound. Spent,
    he must wait the slow
    unalterable forgiveness of time.

AT A COUNTRY FUNERAL
    Now the old ways that have brought us
    farther than we remember sink out of sight
    as under the treading of many strangers
    ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
    they are cast clear again upon the mind
    as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
    lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
    solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
    persist the usages of old neighborhood.
    Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
    knowing the extremity they have come to,
    one of the their own bearing to the earth the last
    of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.
    They stand and think as they stood and thought
    when even the gods were different.
    And the organ music, though decorous
    as for somebody else’s grief, has its source
    in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
    and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
    eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
    and across the sea. How long a time?
    Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let my hide my
    self in Thee. They came, once in time,
    in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
    to the world. The fields and the work
    remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
    of one of the old ones into the Rock
    too often means a lifework perished from the land
    without inheritor, and the field goes wild
    and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
    at cash value into the hands of strangers.
    Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
    for the blood kin to gather, come home
    for one last time, to hear old men
    whose tongues bear an essential topography
    speak memories doomed to die.
    But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
    is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed
    is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
    to pass on into life the knowledge
    of what has died. What we owe the future
    is not a new start, for we can only begin
    with what has happened. We owe the future
    the past, the long knowledge
    that is the potency of time to come.
    That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
    The community of knowing in common is the seed
    of our life in this place. There is not only
    no better possibility, there is no
    other, except for chaos and darkness,
    the terrible ground of the only possible
    new start. And so as the old die and the young
    depart, where shall a man go who keeps
    the memories of the dead, except home
    again, as one would go back after a burial,
    faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
    a second and more final death.

THE RECOGNITION
    You put on my clothes
    and it was as though
    we met some other place
    and I looked and knew
    you. This is what we keep
    going through, the lyrical
    changes, the strangeness
    in which I know again
    what I have known before.

PLANTING CROCUSES
1.
    I made an opening
    to reach through blind
    into time, through
    sleep and silence, to new
    heat, a new rising,
    a yellow flower opening
    in the sound of bees.
2.
    Deathly was the giving
    of that possibility
    to a motion of the world
    that would bring it
    out, bright, in time.
3.
    My mind pressing in
    through the earth’s
    dark motion toward
    bloom, I thought of you,
    glad there is no escape.
    It is this we will be
    turning and re-
    turning to.

PRAISE
1.
    Don’t think of it.
    Vanity is absence.
    Be here. Here
    is the root and stem
    unappraisable
    on whose life
    your life depends
2.
    Be