when blue hydrangeas shimmer in a crystal morning unnoticed and cloud formations fail my gaze and I scuttle from rock to rock and race from red light to red light and when the wind comes up and a discarded bottle whistles in the gutter and I’m unable to remember a name and the screen flickers and a program fails to load and news from the “holy land” is always bad (and when was the last time it was good?) that’s when I go back and read Wendell Berry’s poem The Peace of Wild Things
~
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of 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 for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~
and that’s when a tree grown and green and growing still breaks through the concrete and asphalt in front of the big box store leaf first leaf after leaf twig sprig branchlet and branch rises and a thick tapered trunk stretching high like sequoia boughs wide like cypress and under that shade comes a new climate where we lounge like the queen of hearts freed from the asylum and we scurry no more and remember now to ask the long forgotten questions and all the strident militant causes pop like soap bubbles
and under this tree the world finds its imagination
and each of us finds our poetry
