Wendell Berry speaks at a time of grief

On the day of the funeral service for my mother, after I had led the service, I came across the following poem from Wendell Berry's collection A Timbered Choir": The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 that spoke to me.

A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood
Who gave our rest a haven.
Now fallen, they are given
To labor and distress.
These times we know much evil, little good
To steady us in faith
And comfort when our losses press
Hard on us, and when we choose,
In panic or despair or both,
To keep what we will lose.


For we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go - 
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to his work.
(A Timbered Choir": The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, II 1985)

A probing and peaceful voice

I have just discovered the peaceful yet probing poetry of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist and social critic.

His collection, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 is written in a distinctive voice that is both peaceful and probing. He is an eco-theologian informed deeply by the Psalms and close observance of his own farm and the woods and fileds of his native Kuntucky. Consider the following:
VI
What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty.
To end travail and bring to birth,
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
and every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood whole, in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall - field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath hymn.