Special reading: the farm by Wendell Berry

Today I wanted to treat you to a special reading response to the poem, “The Farm” by one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry. Please enjoy my response.

The Farm
“The Farm” by Wendell Berry is a book length poem capturing the round and round of the country years. Here is my response


The poem opens with a pilgrimage’s crest upon the hillside of a farm. From the humble tunnels of a mouse tunnel through the simple, foundational food-chain source, grasses.
I feel a timelessness as our footsteps linger down Fords Lane, days and years ago and stepping ever further from me in the timeline of the forevers.
He called me to this life. He did not even know. He called to me, a mild voice from the pages of a book in a big, nearly quiet auditorium. I had my knees up on the seat in front of me, my arms on my thighs, my book nestled on my arm. He called, softly as through the wool on the sheep on the other side of the hedgerow In Ireland. Hey. Lookie here. Life lives here.
I told him one day and he snickered an ugly snicker. “Don’t speak til it’s over”
O’er the cyclical fore’res, I believe.
I can almost see it
Almost touch it
The wool.


Invisible in the for’eres
Their work
Which changes the meaning
Is the work meant to be a tattoo on the timeline?
Or a mere new cell, to grow, and die again and be reborn, the product of our offspring, the telephone message of our kin. We transform and mutate. And it is meant to be. Wild and impermanent. A blizzard of snowflakes in the glaciers of time.
Invisible, clear, peaceful. Whispering a voice of the flowing winds, howling wild passion, with abandonment, to the void.
Woad
Hoah
Hoh
Oh


And the babes of goodness come, and we will shelter them as the Father advises,
He speaks of things our country dare not do,
Lest be a savage the likes of which the future live not not--
For why
Live in the past
When we can envision something completely new
Of our own ingenuity
For our own benefit.
We don’t think
We were made
To serve
That which the Great God said we would serve
But that which we eat today
Cannot be so simple
So natural
So pure
It must be sterile
Isolated from imperfection
Good enough
Delightful
We cannot stomach the heartbreak
And so we protect
Overprotect
Isolate
Decontaminate
And freeze at peak freshness,
perfect.
We cannot process imperfection.
We cannot accept it.
We certainly cannot love it.
Can we?
Can we?…


But perhaps we can shatter the illusion
Make it sacred again
We can,
We can--
I promise you, we can


What he says what he says
Do or do not
You decide


“ if you should go and not return and none should follow you, this clarity would be as if it never was. But praise, in knowing this, the genius of the place, whose Way forgives your own, and will resume again in time, if left alone […] and so you make the farm, and so you disappear” (32).
He writes it all
Into the ashes he traces fingerprint drawings,
Mandalas
To one day be blown away in the winds.


They’re bombing the places of afar
Here and there, ere’where
And back at home,
No mason Dixon line separates us
We are a vitiligo,
Pigment of politics plugging the sound of Babylon
We can’t even hear our adversaries
We can’t even hear our brothers and sisters
We can’t even hear our own thoughts


We could at any moment it seems
Fall into a pit
Of barbed thicket seeds
But please
Bless us to remain living souls
Pray bless us


And let us still allow ourselves
To see that the wheel
Will one day turn again
And turn, turn again