The Peace of Wild Things
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 may 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.
Wendell Berry, Poet, author of New Collected Poems
“This poem inspires me because it is so true, so simple, so directly my own experience, and so beautifully expressed. May we, when despair for the world grows in us, lay down in the peace of wild things, and rest in that grace, and be free.”
Terry Patten (1951-2021) author of
A New Republic of the Heart:
An Ethos for Revolutionaries
