A Vision
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
here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides,
fields and gardens rich in the windows.
The river will run clear, as we never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy….
Families will be singing in the fields.
They will take nothing from the ground they will not return….
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 possibility.
(Adapted from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.)
Gracious God, We ask for the grace of perseverance to bring justice and peace to all our people. We ask this in your name.—AMEN.