The Peace Of Wild Things

Mary Oliver
Cleveland Arts Prize

Sitting now in the breezy cool quiet after a storm in Luang Prabang. - All my colleagues are busily working on making maps and carefully preparing to present our research ideas tomorrow.

- Presenting the research idea to them all day was enough work for me so I am reading poems and eating bananas.

I'll sneak out for a beer now and look at the Mekong and the forests.

The Peace Of Wild Things

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 my 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 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 light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



— Wendell Berry