A poem By Wendell Berry
Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.
Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.
Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say
"It is golden" while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name
It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines
I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say
and not mourn : the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.
The silence I have heard recently "sounds [my] silence like a root"--probing deep into unturned places within me.
Being a small farmer is hard: untranslatable in many ways to those not farming. It unfolds and sings in a place where speech can't go. It "lives in the death of speech and sings there."
And yet I am compelled to engage with farming which is as mysterious and strange and awe-inspiring as a a shedding beech tree and stutter that it is "golden"--which falls so flat.
I shy from writing about this thing called farming and I have largely avoided it recently--and yet, the song in my head must be released or else...