The Peace of Wild Things

This was fun...Mom just found this Wendell Berry poem today. I think it may be expressing, more eloquently and with added prose, a similar thought to yesterday's post, Reflections from a Journey into the Wilderness.

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, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Hope, Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

- Emily Dickinson

Rich Gift of God!

O'er the bare woods, whose outstretched hands
Plead with the leaden heavens in vain,
I see, beyond the valley lands,
The sea's long level dim with rain.
Around me all things, stark and dumb,
Seem praying for the snows to come,
And, for the summer bloom and greenness gone,
With winter's sunset lights and dazzling morn atone.

Along the river's summer walk,
The withered tufts of asters nod;
And trembles on its arid stalk
The boar plume of the golden-rod.
And on a ground of sombre fir,
And azure-studded juniper,
The silver birch its buds of purple shows,
And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose!

With mingled sound of horns and bells,
A far-heard clang, the wild geese fly,
Storm-sent, from Arctic moors and fells,
Like a great arrow through the sky,
Two dusky lines converged in one,
Chasing the southward-flying sun;
While the brave snow-bird and the hardy jay
Call to them from the pines, as if to bid them stay.

Rich gift of God! A year of time
What pomp of rise and shut of day,
What hues wherewith our Northern clime
Makes autumn's dropping woodlands gay,
What airs outblown from ferny dells,
And clover-bloom and sweetbrier smells,
What songs of brooks and birds, what fruits and flowers,
Green woods and moonlit snows, have in its round been ours!

The Last Walk in Autumn, John Greenleaf Whittier

Firm-Rooted in the Faith that God is Good

We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave
Of text and legend. Reason's voice and God's.
Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds.
What asks our Father of His children, save
Justice and mercy and humility,
A reasonable service of good deeds,
Pure living, tenderness to human needs,
Reverence and trust and prayer for light to see
The Master's footprints in our daily ways?
No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife,
But the calm beauty of an ordered life
Whose very breathing is unworded praise!-
A life that stands as all true lives have stood,
Firm-rooted in the faith that God is Good.

- Requirement by John Greenleaf Whittier, Nineteenth Century Quaker Poet

Discard Neither a Moment or a Dream

Two things have I seen in conflict,
yet in harmony they should be:

The anticipation of a joyous dream yet to be consummated,
and the satisfaction of living the present moment in abundance.

Hast Thou No Scar

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has nor wound nor scar? – Amy Carmichael of India

O Lord, Our Strength and Confidence

O Lord, our strength and confidence
Our eyes are unto Thee
Thou art the rock of our defense
Our song of victory
Thou who dost still the violence
Of any raging sea

Thou at the flood didst sit as King
What are our floods to Thee
To whom it is a little thing
To walk upon the sea
We wait to hail Thee conquering
King of eternity

Only, O Lord our God, we pray
Teach us to do Thy will
Through windy hours and flying spray
Thy purposes fulfill
Until the word of yesterday
Thou speakest - "Peace be still." - Amy Carmichael

Toward Jerusalem

Love through me, Love of God.
Make me like thy clear air
Through which, unhindered, colors pass
As if it were not there. - Amy Carmichael, Toward Jerusalem

When All Has Been Given

This was written in compassion for those who have planted the seeds of love and truth, wisdom and care in one deeply loved and have harvested only the affliction of rejection.

When all has been given
All the love, all the care, all of the hope
All of the forbearance, all of the sharing the burden of pain
All of the deepest desires for a wellspring of life
All of the faith for life anew
All of the listening, all of the pain heard about hope had and now gone

When all has been given
And not all received
Not received because of all of the hurt
That has hardened a heart toward all of the love
Manifested through the love of all that has been given

When all has been given
And the time for giving has ceased
Ceased because of all of the hurt
That could not receive all of the love

When all has been given
And we look into the painful mirror of the past and see
What could have been said, what love could have done
So that the mirror of the past was not plagued
By the horror of what is now the present

When all has been given
And not all received
And the time for giving has ceased
And we look into the mirror and see the pain of the past
All that can be done is to see that

When all has been given
It is God that places a blanket of grace
Over the past of the acts of love given
That were not received
And over the past of the acts of love withheld
That were never given

When all has been given
And the blanket of God’s grace tucked in
The past is restored and the present is set free
Because the infinitude of God stretches over
The acts of love withheld
That were never given
And transforms
The acts of love given
That were never received

When all has been given
Grace gives the rest

Trust

The same old baffling questions! O my friend,
I cannot answer them. In vain I send
My soul into the dark, where never burn
The lamps of science, nor the natural light
Of Reason's sun and stars! I cannot learn
Their great and solemn meanings, nor discern
The awful secrets of the eyes which turn
Evermore on us through the day and night
With silent challenge and a dumb demand
Proffering the riddles of the dread unkown
Like the calm Sphinxes, with their eyes of stone,
Questioning the centuries from their veils of sand!
I have no answer for myself or thee,
Save that I learned beside my mother's knee
"All is of God that is, and is to be;
And God is good." Let this suffice us still,
Resting in childlike trust upon His will
Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill.

- John Greenleaf Whittier

When the Frost Is On the Pumpkin

by James Whitcome Riley


WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bare-headed, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here --
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pitcur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock --
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries --kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below -- the clover overhead! --
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!
Then your apples all is getherd, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin' 's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage, too! . . .
I don't know how to tell it -- but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me --
I'd want to 'commondate 'em -- all the whole-indurin' flock --
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

~It is a family tradition for Dad to read this poem right around the first frost.