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[with three poems by Wendell Berry]

Y’all sure do favor!

So folks say when they first see my father and me together. He’s 94. I can’t say I see it but others do so there you are.

On the bookshelf in his living room is a small framed photo of my father about age 3, the same age as our grandson Bert right now. Now those two do favor! Two peas in a pod, cut from the same cloth, much of a muchness. Look at them with that one smile between them, look at those eyes, little imps, look at the domes of those foreheads. Let me just scroll through all these photos Bert’s parents have texted us and you’ll surely see how Wilson and Bert favor.

But where are the photos of my father at 3 making a face, lining up his lead soldiers, stacking his rough-cut handmade blocks? Where dancing? I suspect that framed studio portrait was a Christmas present from Grandmother’s brother Sidney – the rest of the family was surviving the depression on grits and squirrel gravy, the occasional bartered hog shoulder, never two nickels to rub together. The rare snapshots we have of aunts and cousins are from Uncle Sidney’s camera, the only one in the family.

Another depression is upon us now. We are all doing without something. Photos abound but Bert is not free to stand beside his great-grandfather, to show us their one smile between them. When will the day return that may show us how much we all do favor?

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The poetry of Wendell Berry returns me to the center: the center of the fields and woods he walks; the center of time that stretches from long before me to long after; the center of meaning in a universe in which I am not the center but which nevertheless makes a place for me.

These three poems are from Mr. Berry’s book Sabbaths, published in 1987. A moment of stillness, of contemplation, of connection to the earth and all that fills it makes any place sacred and any day Sabbath. My dread, my grief, my struggle during these times are no different really from any times. These things don’t recede, they don’t disappear. They simply take their place in this moment: no before, no after, only now, and I and you and all of us connected in the journey to discover within them some promise of peace.

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VIII (1979)

I go from the woods into the cleared field:
A place no human made, a place unmade
by human greed, and to be made again.
Where centuries of leaves once built by dying
A deathless potency of light and stone
And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless
Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,
The growth of fifty thousand years undone
In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock
And clay – a “new land,” truly, that no race
Was ever native to, but hungry mice
And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns
And thistles sent by generosity
Of new beginning. No Eden, this was
A garden once, a good and perfect gift;
Its possible abundance stood in it
As it then stood. But now what it might be
Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives –
Thousands of years to make it what it was,
Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

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X (1982)

The dark around us, come,
Let us meet here together,
Members one of another,
Here in our holy room,

Here on our little floor,
Here in the daylit sky,
Rejoicing mind and eye,
Rejoining known and knower,

Light, leaf, foot, hand, and wing,
Such order as we know,
One household, high and low,
And all the earth shall sing.

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III (1982)

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago,
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;
The new grass trembles under the wind’s flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does the time recover it.
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it.

all selections from Sabbaths, Wendell Berry, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1987
Thank you, Anne Gulley, who gave Linda and me this book many years ago.

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Southern Harebell, Campanula divaricata, Campanulaceae (Bellflower) family

[with two poems by Lola Haskins]

I sat in the ophthalmologist’s office reading Lola Haskins and wondering. I’ve put off this visit due to COVID and I’m overdue, seeing Dr. Bondalapati for the first time. She is new here, just moved to Elkin from Chapel Hill with her family last summer. Most of her staff I’ve known for years, although it is still welcoming to be recognized behind the mask.

All of us masked. Wondering. Are our precautions enough? Is it OK to be together like this?

Isn’t it remarkable how much eyes alone can communicate? Eyebrows bobbing, winky lids, wrinkly skin of brow and temple, lovely corrugator muscles. I left the office happy to have seen my new doctor and Deanna, Karen, all the others.

Bridge the separations. Make community. Take nothing for granted.

I am also restored and innervated by Lola Haskins’s poems. I heard her read several years ago and just bought her collection, how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016). Isn’t it remarkable how much a few words and a few lines alone can communicate? Seeing through another’s eyes. Another’s voice in my ears . . .

. . . like happiness // it materialized so gradually / that I never even for a moment // saw it coming

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The Cabin at Fakahatchee Strand

by morning the water has turned such
silver I want to put it on i know

it would only flutter off my skin
like a bird too quick to follow

but i don’t care i want it anyway
and i want that tangle of cattail

and black rush too the way i want
to be perpetually waking to

yet another gift like the single gator
stretched out on the muck

where pond has begun to thicken
to swamp like happiness

it materialized so gradually
that i never even for a moment

saw it coming

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Lola Haskins, from how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016)

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Flight

if i eat feathers asks the child
will i be able to fly?

you already can says her mother
any night
the lightness in you my lift you
from your cot
that’s why i close the windows

when i get old enough the child
wonders

will you open them? oh yes
comes the answer

(sorrowing) that’s what
mothers do

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Lola Haskins, from how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press, 2016)

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Haskins writes with the startling freedom and grace of a kite flying, and with the variety and assurance of invention that reveal, in image after image, the dream behind the waking world.
W.S.Merwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former U. S. Poet Laureate

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