The Peace of the Wild Things

April is National Poetry Month, so I decided to go through poems I saved and write about a few. I ended up settling on Wendell Berry’s “Peace of the Wild Things” because it really is one of my favorites and also feels like Spring, the season in which we are now, definitively, situated. (Don’t believe it? Look at all the road work, the true harbinger of Spring.)
Berry’s poem is short, so I’ll share it in full —
“When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. / I come into the peace of the wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their life. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”