Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry (1934- ) is the first of four children of Virginia Erdman Berry and John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer. Both the Erdmans and the Berrys have farmed in Kentucky’s Henry County for at least five generations.

Wendell earned a B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky, and in 1958, pursuing his love of writing, he attended Stanford University’s creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. As poet, essayist, fiction writer, and farmer, he has advocated personal activism on behalf of the environment. 

A Wet Time

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised. 

The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

become obscure in their use, prehistoric. 

The mind passes over changed surfaces 

like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

and to the thought of swimming and wading birds. 

Along the river croplands and gardens 

are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark 

and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

holding the new nest of the hummingbird 

the river flows heavy with earth, the water 

turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

deep in the mud of the shore, a stake 

planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood 

passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

drag the bottom. I was not ready for this 

parting, my native land putting out to sea.

— Wendell Berry