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
