Wendell Berry Gives the Heart's Acceptance Speech

Some songs for the morning after our gathering for Obama's victory from Wendell Berry's Sabbath watches between 2000 and 2004 at a window like the one before me now, as we gather our renewed citizenship for a new citizenry in this country. Our waking this morning is an ark from which we are taken by our own hands in ancient volition. Breath itself is the legato touch of will and that soft willing is wisdom when it is blessed with these tender feelings of renewal and hope. And the frequencies of breath are too low and slow, as Wendell is about to say, to be any other light but the words for light and lantern. No need, as another poet wrote, to hold a candle to the sun. We are gathered; we are reassembled; we are present and accounted for in this first light of the first new day we have shared in years. I give you my dear friend, Wendell Berry, to speak some highlights of the heart's eternal acceptance speech.



When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.

* * * *

Alone, afoot, in the moonless night
Out on the world's edge with his hounds,
What was he looking to set right?
The world sings at its farthest bounds.
To know it does sets right the dark,
And so an old man found his work.

* * * *

Some had derided him
As unadventurous,
For he would not give up

What he had vowed to keep.
But what he vowed to keep
Even his keeping changed

And, changing, left him far
Beyond what they or he
Foresaw, and made him strange.

What he vowed to keep
He lost, of course, and yet
Kept in his heart. The things

He vowed to keep, the things
He had in keeping changed,
The things lost in his keeping

That he kept in his heart,
These were his pilgrimage,
Were his adventure, near

And far, at home and in
The world beyond this world.

* * * *

Teach me work that honors Thy work,
the true economies of goods and words,
to make my arts compatible
with the songs of the local birds.

Teach me patience beyond work
and, beyond patience, the blest
Sabbath of Thy unresting love
which lights all things and gives rest.

* * * *

All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one's patriotic duty
to say so and to oppose. What else have we to live for?

* * * *

[a Bodhisattva's vow]
To think of gathering all
the sorrows of this place
into myself, and so
sparing the others:
What freedom! What joy!

* * * *

It takes all time to show eternity,
The longest shine of every perishing spark,
And every word and cry of every tongue
Must form the Word that calls the darkness dark

Of this world to its lasting dawn. Toward
That rising hour we hear our single hearts
Estranged as islands parted in the sea,
Our broken knowledge and our scattered arts.

As separate as fireflies or night windows,
We piece a foredream to the gathered light
Infinitely small and great to shelter all,
Silenced into song, blinded into sight.

--Wendell Berry, Given, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005