Song in a Year of Catastrophe.

I began to be followed by a voice saying: "it can't last. It can't last. Harden yourself. Harden yourself. Be ready. Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves," it said, "for what is living there is long dead in your tongue." And it said, "Put your hands into the earth. Live close to the ground. Learn the darkness. Gather round you all the things that you love, name their names, prepare to lose them. It will be as if all you know were turned around within your body."

And i went and put my hands into the ground, and they took root and grew into a season's harvest. I looked behind the veil of the leaves, and heard voices that i knew had been dead in my tongue years before my birth. I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me. Waking in the early mornings, i could hear it, like a bird bemused among the leaves, a mockingbird idly singing in the autumn of catastrophe: "Be ready. Be ready. Harden Yourself. Harden yourself."

And i heard the sound of a great engine pounding in the air, and a voice asking: "Change or slavery? Hardship of slavery?" and voices answering: "Slavery! Slavery!" And i was afraid, loving what i knew would be lost.

Then the voice following me said: "You have not yet come close enough. Come nearer the ground. Learn from the woodcock in the woods whose feathering is a ritual of the fallen leaves, and from the nesting quail whose speckling makes her hard to see in the long grass. Study the coat of the mole. For the farmer shall wear the furrows and the greenery of his fields, and bear the long standing of the woods."

And i asked: "You mean death then?" "Yes," the voice said. "Die into what the earth requires of you." I let go all holds then, and sank like a hopeless swimmer into the earth, and at last came fully into ease and the joy of that place, all my lost ones returning.

-Wendell Berry 9/28/68