The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
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 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 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.
From the Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1999)
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