Sabbath Poem

While the holiday shopping season gears up here in the states, a poem as a gift for presence, for beauty. For "the world as it was given for love’s sake." From "A Timbered Choir" by Wendell Berry

1979: VII

What if, in the high, restful sanctuary

That keeps the memory of Paradise,

We’re followed by the drone of history

And greed’s poisonous fumes still burn our eyes?

Disharmony recalls us to our work.

From Heavenly work of light and wind and leaf

We must turn back into the peopled dark

Of our unraveling century, the grief

Of waste, the agony of haste and noise.

It is a hard return from Sabbath rest

To lifework of the fields, yet we rejoice,

Returning, less condemned in being blessed

By vision of what human work can make:

A harmony between forest and field,

The world as it was given for love’s sake,

The world by love and loving work revealed

As given to our children and our Maker.

In that healed harmony the world is used

But not destroyed, the Giver and the taker

Joined, the taker blessed, in the unabused

Gift that nurtures and protects. Then workday

And Sabbath live together in one place.

Though mortal, incomplete, that harmony

Is our one possibility of peace.

When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme

That stirs in distant memory the whole

First Sabbath’s song that no largess of time

Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall.

But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,

Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,

A little song to keep us unafraid,

An earthly music magnified in air.