This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me a copy of Berry’s talk “Health is Membership” http://tipiglen.co.uk/berryhealth.html, a talk full of wisdom well-expressed, a wonderful gift from somebody I don’t know.

Wanting to read more poems by Berry, I searched and found several. Here’s one that particularly appealed—yes, another poem about death. In his talk, Berry said: “And yet love must confront death, and accept it, and learn from it. Only in confronting death can earthly love learn its true extent, its immortality. Any definition of health that is not silly must include death. The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof.”

It is, as Berry writes in the poem, “well” for the old to die. The light in them/us has darkened, but when we die the light again becomes the sky, a wonderful image. Meanwhile, the young “turn back to the world, grown strangely alert to each other’s bodies.” Death inspires love and sex in those still living.

The Burial of the Old by Wendell Berry

The old, whose bodies encrust their lives,
Die, and that is well.
They unhinder what has struggled in them,

The light, painfully loved, that narrowed
And darkened in their minds
Becomes again the sky.

The young, who have looked on dying,
Turn back to the world, grown strangely
Alert to each other’s bodies.