[Dialogue] A Wendell Berry poem for this day.

[Doris Hahn via Dialogue]

Thank you for the poem, Seth.

Doris Hahn

On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 9:30 PM, Seth Longacre via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> I thought this poem would resonate with many of us.
>
> It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
> for hope must not depend on feeling good
> and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
> You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
> of the future, which surely will surprise us,
> and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
> any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
> The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
> Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
>
> Because we have not made our lives to fit
> our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
> the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
> then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
> of what it is that no other place is, and by
> your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
> place that you belong to though it is not yours,
> for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.
>
> Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
> your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
> who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
> and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
> fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
> in the trees in the silence of the fisherman
> and the heron, and the trees that keep the land
> they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
>
> This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
> or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
> when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
> when they ask for your land and your work.
> Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
> and how to be here with them. By this knowledge
> make the sense you need to make. By it stand
> in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
>
> Speak to your fellow humans as your place
> has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
> Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
> before they had heard a radio. Speak
> publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
>
> Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
> from the pages of books and from your own heart.
> Be still and listen to the voices that belong
> to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
> There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
> by which it speaks for itself and no other.
>
> Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
> Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
> underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
> freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
> and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
> Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
> which is the light of imagination. By it you see
> the likeness of people in other places to yourself
> in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
> toward other people, other creatures, in other places
> as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
>
> No place at last is better than the world. The world
> is no better than its places. Its places at last
> are no better than their people while their people
> continue in them. When the people make
> dark the light within them, the world darkens.
>
> ~ Wendell Berry ~
>
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