Sabbath Poem 10. 1979, Wendell Berry
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
Standing By Words. That was the title of the book, and the first essay I ever read by Wendell Berry. It becomes clear that this man cares for words, and understands the potency of speech and writing to move, inform, deceive, persuade, wound, renew, encourage, undermine and more generally influence the way human beings communicate and learn to live with each other - or not. The essay is about the abuse of language, the b aleful effects of rhetoric, propaganda, misinformation and the use of media to propagate and perpetuate lies. I may come back to that essay another time.
For now it is the positive, community building and humane constructiveness of Berry's work that is so clearly voiced in poems such as the harvest poem above. Berry's essays, novels and poems all come back to how we live more humanely, sustainably and generously all of which are captured in the ideas of neighbourliness. Except that for Berry neighbours are those who are both near us geographically, and near to us in a shared humanity bearing joint responsibility for the earth, its creatures and its future.
His Sabbath Poems are a category of writing that is deeply reflective, occasionally provocative, and range through the emotional responsiveness of a man who understands gratitude, regret, moral aspiration, love, the urge to dominance, the sin of waste and greed, the joy of growing things and letting things grow. He has a love for the land that is sacramental in its reverence, an outrage at war and mechanised technology as threats to both our human future and the wellbeing of the planet. He wants to beat swords into ploughshares, and combine harvesters after that.
Wendell Berry is that strange mixture of prophet and farmer - actually so was Amos from Tekoa. Few American poets and essayists have been as persistently articulate in arguing for a much more responsible curatorship of the earth and its resources, and in protesting the greed and waste of consumer capitalism as it lays waste the land and the lives of billions in the non-Western world.
So when I read these Sabbath Poems I am at times re-educated in the syllabus of neighbourliness, attentiveness, and our responsibility to generosity in handling whatever I happen to own. The poem 'Whatever is foreseen in joy' leads us through our personal accomplishments and our work contribution to the necessity of grace, the reality of gift as that which we did not earn and did not make happen. "The field is tilled /' and left to grace..."
The Genesis creation story lies like ploughed furrows throughout the poem. The sweat of the brow, ten thousand days of work, and the seventh day of Sabbath, and the verdict that "finds it is good." Yesterday, walking beside a centuries old, moss-covered, drystane dyke, looking past autumn berries to a barley field, and beyond the edge of the Scottish Highlands, it isn't hard to think and feel grateful, and wistful with that longing that such a beautiful world deserves much better of us.
It is God's world, not ours. We are stewards, not strip miners of all that we can hoard. If we do our work for ten thousand days, break sweat and feel the ache in our hands, we still need that which is beyond our effort; the gift of life, the grace that gives the growth, the mercy that sustains both us and our earth, God's earth. All of this, and more, from a poet whose voice has been for healing, of the heart, of the neighbour, and of the world.
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