Wendell Berry: Speech to Garden Club of America

Published in The New Yorker

(with thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rose.)

Thank you. Iʼm glad to know weʼre friends, of course,

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add that Iʼm sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied – our world! We speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges, poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food thatʼs fast or cheap to falsify

The bodyʼs health and pleasure – donʼt ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Natureʼs laws that still keep us alive?

Let us lighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than a summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

“”” Wendell Berry

” ” ” New Yorker 9/28/09

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