Note to Self 8/11/15, on returning home to Lake Delaware The maddened world runs About Trying to find you, O Self And, seemingly obtained like a pearl in a dream, To feed your ferocious Demands Calling Your chill, violent and gaping throat Esteem And the polished chain of justification Enlightenment’s golden beam While empires pass Like a star’s ghostly...
Read MoreThanksgiving July 18, 2015 Sitting on a hay wagon in the flats after the fair, tired. An hour ago High summer mustered all Mounted And rode out of the boiling west Countless horses before and behind One great deluge over the whole wide earth Riding on, riding on No sooner come Than gone. Now As if a slow...
Read MoreStill Friends July 16, 2015 Before retiring for the night. I used to turn women’s heads But no one looks twice at a middle-aged priest. Since I took the collar Countless friends Have one by one disappeared; My name, I imagine Invoked less and less Amidst the closed pockets of open society But when invoked Invoked with...
Read MoreThe Dairy Barn Lake Delaware, 2015 Rocky meadow rolls down to her foundation stones As proud as any mountain, she still stands Hanging on Though her bones of timber here and there Show through And the metal on her roof Finds the ground Will summer swallows still come ‘round? What will they do When she finally...
Read MoreA Brief Parousia Mountain Brook Road, 12/2/20 Seven deer sidle Through Like mist A brief Parousia Between one hidden life and Another Now Roils the wind Now blinding snow, now All hail these lucid tongues of flame From the heart of An unseen Sun Now drops The veil Even darkness Obscured Who can know Whence they come Or wither all things go? If I could live like This Surely I...
Read MoreA Long Arrival Home 8/24/15 Every week I preach a sermon But only fifteen people come to hear; Verse after verse, line after line A thousand written pages remain Unread beneath the dust; Year after year my soul Has become Countless songs Which have touched only the ears Of spiders and kitchen mice. Travelling to the city I...
Read MoreJohn Murdock, writer, attorney, and globetrotting localist with roots in Texas, recently reviewed The Disfiguration of Nature on Front Porch Republic's website. He begins, "Wendell Berry, while still writing more than most of us, is squarely in the awards and laurels stage of his earthly journey....
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