From Nothing

From nothing. From scratch. From the beginning.
Begin from the beginning. Every single time but now again
more purely from the beginning. Those empty palms!
A scrutiny of your end and your beginning
in the grey light, in the suburbs of darkness . . .
Sit and wait with your shoes on. Ready
not for a leap but for the first step.
A smoothed out state . . . A condition
where nothing is yours. Those empty palms
have cost you much. And this is your gain.

  —Ella Hillbäck, translated by Robin Fulton

The Law that Marries All Things

1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.

The rain is free
only in falling.

The water is free only
in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.

      —Wendell Berry

Work without Hope

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

      Yet well I ken  the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

     —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An Architecture

Like a room, the clear stanza
of birdsong opens among the noises
of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light's beginnings,
lifting broken gray of the night's
end, the bird hastens to his song
 
as to a place, a room commenced
at the end of sleep. Around
him his singing is entire.

     —Wendell Berry