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 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.

Notes: As our confinement lengthens, and the virus victim numbers climb, we are in a world scarier than fiction. But no matter how off-kilter the world may seem, humans have weathered worse in the past. We all descend from those who survived the 1918 flu, the great depression, world wars, famines, and recessions. We will make it through this, too.