Poem: The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

View the NOHLC photo poem The Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world

Grows in me

And I awake in the night

At the least sound,

In fear of what my life

And my children’s lives might 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 feel above me the dayblind stars,

Waiting with their light.

For a time,

I rest in the grace of the world

And I am free.

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