Work Song Part 2 A Vision (Epilogue)

Maxfield Parrish

Work Song Part 2 - A Vision (Epilogue)

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…

The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

Wendell Berry
from "New Collected Poems" 

I read this poem for the first time the other day and it seemed like it was meant to flow naturally from the last one ("Grass", by Carl Sandburg). Continuing the slow organic reclaiming of the landscape up from the grass and into the tree-trunks and branches. That image of ourselves as rich soil and old forest for generations in the future is so reinforcing. If we can just survive our wars, our ignorance, our tragedies ( I mean this is the personal sense as well, our individual downfall and undoing) and "stand like slow growing trees", just stand, our lives will feed those around us, and those to come, layer upon layer, like the leaves feed the roots of the forest. It's an incredible image, that of the rivers running clear, new memories becoming old stories and songs, the ruined landscape recovering its health and becoming, as Dylan Thomas says ("Poem in October") "a green chapel" full of parables and mysteries and abundance. That is something to hold on to, that. That is something to help one to stand. Not without struggle, but with hope nonetheless.