When you require renewal, any particular poem or book you return to?
Yes, Wendell Berry’s poem “The Wild Geese”. There are other poems that I resort to also but this one is especially important. And when I feel a poem is important I try to memorise it. It’s about the end of a busy farming season, a day of relaxing, time to think about departed friends, to look at the “tree in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow”, and to consider the way the geese that fly overhead hold to their way, trusting to their faith in their direction. And it closes with a prayer “to be quiet in heart, in eye clear”. I think those few words are absolutely essential to a poet’s way of being, to consider carefully, to see clearly.
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