Wendell Berry’s poems are rooted in the quiet rhythms of rural life, offering a gentle but powerful meditation on land, community, and human responsibility. His writing often celebrates the beauty of the natural world—fields, rivers, forests, seasons—and he uses these landscapes to explore deeper questions about belonging and moral living. Berry’s poetry carries a strong sense of gratitude and simplicity, reminding readers that true richness comes from living in harmony with nature rather than exploiting it.
A central theme in his work is “place”—the idea that a meaningful life grows from caring for the land and people around us. His poems often blend personal reflection with ecological awareness, urging readers to slow down, observe, and cherish the ordinary miracles of daily life. Berry also writes about faith, work, love, and the quiet dignity of rural communities, weaving them into a vision of a more humane and sustainable world.
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| Wendell berry |
His voice is calm, reflective, and deeply ethical—never loud, but always steady. Wendell Berry’s poems invite us to reconsider what it means to live well: to be present, responsible, and connected. Through simple language and profound insight, he offers a path toward balance, stewardship, and inner peace.
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
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.
September 2
In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
A Meeting
In a Dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."
In this World
The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
The Lilies
Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found
the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,
frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air
held or moved them as it stood or moved.
The ground that slept beneath us woke in them
and made a music of the light, as it had waked
and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,
and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair
for all that time. Does my land have the health
of this, where nothing falls but into life?
Water
I was born in a drouth year. That summer
my mother waited in the house, enclosed
in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,
for the men to come back in the evenings,
bringing water from a distant spring.
veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank.
And all my life I have dreaded the return
of that year, sure that it still is
somewhere, like a dead enemys soul.
Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me,
and I am the faithful husband of the rain,
I love the water of wells and springs
and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns.
I am a dry man whose thirst is praise
of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.
My sweetness is to wake in the night
after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.
Woods
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
