By Linda Blackford | Editor
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It’s a sad day in Kentucky this morning. Just a week after the death of beloved neighbor Dolly Parton, we’ve lost of our own and one of our greatest: Wendell Berry. The writer, farmer and activist died on Monday at his Henry County Farm. He’s known for so many words and so much wisdom that he sent out around the world. Sarah Ladd wrote the obituary below.
Here is one of his most famous poems, “The Peace of the 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.”
-From the collection The Peace of the Wild Things and Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)
Wendell Berry with Nip and Jed, Lane’s Landing Farm, Henry County, KY 2012. (Photo by Guy Mendes)
By Sarah Ladd
Kentucky writer and conservationist Wendell Berry once wrote: “Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.”
A lover of forests, the farmer, author and former English professor died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, according to the New York Times and other media reports. He was 92.
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