Читать книгу The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry - Wendell Berry - Страница 8
Оглавлениеfrom The Broken Ground
THE APPLE TREE
for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon
In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.
THE WILD
In the empty lot—a place
not natural, but wild—among
the trash of human absence,
the slough and shamble
of the city’s seasons, a few
old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds
fly and sing
in the new foliage
—warblers and tanagers, birds
wild as leaves; in a million
each one would be rare,
new to the eyes. A man
couldn’t make a habit
of such color,
such flight and singing.
But they are the habit of this
wasted place. In them
the ground is wise. They are
its remembrance of what it is.
THE PLAN
My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him,
and I say I will—both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be
years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow,
in honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat
and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.
THE BROKEN GROUND
The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.
