The Peace of 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.

--Wendell Berry