From Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
IV.
Who makes a clearing makes a work of art,
The true world’s Sabbath trees in festival
Around it. And the stepping stream, a part
Of Sabbath also, flows past, but its fall
Made musical, making the hillslope by
Its fall, and still at rest in falling, song
Rising. The field is made by hand and eye,
By daily work, by hope outreaching wrong,
And yet the Sabbath, parted, still must stay
In the dark mazings of the soil no hand
May light, the great Life, broken, make its way
Along the streamy footholds of the ant.
Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,
Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.