a sabbath poem

for the last quarter of a century, wendell berry has spent his sunday mornings walking, observing, and meditating through verse on the world around him and its relationship to its creator. the fruit of these walks can be found in a timbered choir (with even more poems to be published later this year in given). i try to spend some time with a different poem each sunday and then reflect on it throughout the week. i find this exercise a good one. not only is it spiritually beneficial, but it also makes wb's poetry (of which we have far too little available) last longer. what follows is one of his sabbath poems from 1979.

"What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
And every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall--field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath's hymn."
(a timbered choir, 13)