Wendell Berry - A Timbered Choir

1983 111
Now though the season warms the woods inherits harms of human enterprise.
Our making shakes the skies and taints the atmosphere. We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live: our living blights the leaf.
A clamor high above entered the shadowed grove, withdrew, was still, and the the water thrush began the song that is a prayer. A form made in the air that all who live here pray, the Sabbath of our day.
May our kind live to breathe air worthy of the breath of all singers that sing in joy of their making, Light of the risen year, songs worthy of the ear of breathers worth their air., of workers worth their hire.

1985 V
How long does it take to make the woods? As long as it takes to make the world. The woods is present as the world is, the presence of all its past, and of all its time to come. It is always finished, it is always being made, the act of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction. It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning belong to the end and beginning of all things, the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.
What is the way to the woods, how do you go there? By climbing up thru the six days field, kept in all the body's years, the body's sorrow, weariness and joy. by passing thru the narrow gate on the far side of that field where the pasture grass of the body's life gives way to the high, original standing of the treees. By coming into the shadow, the shadow of the grace of the strait way's ending, the shadow of the mercy of light.
Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. you must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eyed and leaf.
1986 I
Slowly, Slowly they return to the small woodland let along: great trees, outspreading and upright, Apostles of the living light.
Patient as stars, they build in air Tier after tier a timbered choir, stout beams upholding weightless grace of song, a blessing on this place.
They stand in waiting all around, uprisings of their native ground, downcomings of the distant light; they are the advent they await.
Recieving sun and giving shade their lifes a benefaction made and is a benediction said over the living and the dead.
In fall their brightened leaves, realeased, fly down the wind, and we are pleased to walk on radiance, amazed. O light come down to earth, be praised!
1988 II, V
II
It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it? It is our own bodies that we give to be broken, our bodies existing before and after us in clod and cloud, worm and tree, that we, driving or driven, despise in our greed to live, our haste to die. To have lost, wantonly, the ancient forest, the vast grasslands is our madness, the presence in our very bodies of our grief.
V
Always in the distance the sound of cars is passing on the road, that simplest form going only two ways, both ways away. And I have been there in that going.
But now I rest and am apart, a prt of the form of the woods always arriving from all directions home, this cell of wild sound, the hush of the trees, singers hidden among the leaves-
a form whose history is old, needful, unknown, and bright as the history of the stars that tremble in the sky at night like leaves of a great tree.

1989 I, VI
1990 II, III
1991 I, II