Hard Choices

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Neither of my parents finished high school, but they are both avid-readers and life-long learners. When I was growing up, they would challenge us to pick a poem and have it memorized by dinner. I fell in love with William Blake, because of his loveliness, and now I realize, because many of his poems are only four lines.

I could pick a different favorite every day of the year. A dozen of Mary Oliver's, twice that of Emily Dickinson. The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. Mother to Son by Langston Hughes. Hopkins and Woodsworth and Galway Kinnell. Cummings and Yeats and William Stafford. Now I know why I posted this challenge: so I'd have an excuse to peruse our shelf of poetry and reread all the dog-earred favorites.

I know I just snuck ten poems into the above paragraph, but I'll only take up a bit more space with this one, an old and today's favorite, 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.