Restore.

The DREAM

            I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

            I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.

I am aware of the rattling of their branches,

the lichened channels of their bark, the saps of

the ground flowing upward to their darkness.

Like the afterimage of a light that only by not

looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.

All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish

in dying as in being born. It is the life of its death.

            I must end, always, by replacing

our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,

the flowing in of history,

putting back what I took away,

trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge

to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

            My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness

growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.

I see that my mind is not good enough.

I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.

I find in my mouth the bitter taste of money,

a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all

that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

           

            Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

Wendell Berry

Thanks, Mom.