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 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry is a farmer, novelist, poet, and cultural critic. This poem is reprinted from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1999) with permission.
