What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.1
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’s hymn.
From Wendell Berry, This day: Sabbath poems collected and new, 1979-2013, (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Berkeley, CA, 2013), p. 15.
- I can’t help but wonder if it should be “what time has stolen.” ↩︎
