52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
47. Sabbaths.
Poems resulting from weekly walks taken in the woods on/near Berry’s farm. Presented chronologically, but generally moving thematically through the seasons. Mostly reflections on the Sabbath; but also dealing with:
- light, light as a metaphor for the Breath of God
- “leaf, light, wing, hand, soil“
- God works in death, and rests in life. Life rises to rest.
- The praise that every thing gives unceasingly.
- (rarely) the intrusion of man into the natural order.
- It takes work to make of the land what time and neglect will do naturally. This work is our entry into grace.
An example (which I would like to remember):
1979 XII.
To long for what eternity fulfills
Is to forsake the light one has, or wills
To have, and go into the dark, to wait
What light may come — no light perhaps, the dark
Insinuates. And yet the dark conceals
All possibilities: thought, word, and light,
Air, water, earth, motion, and song, the arc,
Of lives through light, eyesight, hope, rest, and work –
And death, the narrow gate each one must pass
Alone, as some have gone past every guess
Into the woods by a path lost to all
Who look back, gone past light and sound of day
Into grief’s wordless catalogue of loss.
As the known life is given up, birdcall
Become the only language of the way,
The leaves all shine with sudden light, and stay.
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Berry is really good with the closing line/couplet. These poems work together to move the reader toward a sense of rest, or need of rest.
