Fumbling Toward Grace
In my deeply entrenched love for poetry, I have decided to share a poem a day for the whole of October. Since I am reading one of Wendell Berry’s novels, Hannah Coulter, at the moment, I’m going to kick off this bonanza of verse with one of Mr. Berry’s own.
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.
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.
Printed here from the book Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation edited by Roger Housden
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