Cover

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

‘A farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,’ WENDELL BERRY is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and essays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the T. S. Eliot Award, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the National Humanities Medal. For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed in his native Henry Country, Kentucky, with his wife, Tanya, and their children and grandchildren.

THE BROKEN GROUND

The Apple Tree

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.

An Architecture

Like a clear room, the clear stanza

of birdsong opens among the noises

of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light’s beginnings,

lifting broken gray of the night’s

end, the bird hastens to his song

as to a place, a room commenced

at the end of sleep. Around

him his singing is entire.

Canticle

for Robert Hazel

What death means is not this –

the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,

praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can’t justify and explain itself,

death can’t justify and explain it.

A creed and a grave never did equal the life

of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts

of ancient stones at the beginning of April.

The black clothes of the priests are turned

against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;

they wait in their blackness to earn joy

by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,

and so their lives are paid. Money slots

in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,

the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.

The Wild

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’re the habit of this

wasted place. In them

the ground is wise. They are