The Peace of Wild Things

Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Wendell Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things

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.

Source: “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
by Wendell Berry. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998.