Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

A few weeks ago, The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor featured the poem "Goods" by Wendell Berry. In the poem, Berry writes about immemorial feelings, like hunger and thirst and loneliness and love. Then the poem opens for us, and we are suddenly grounded with the imagery of pastures, and the green growth of March, and of a team of Belgian mares. It's the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; the gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. This is an intimate poem, allowing us a glimpse into Wendell Berry's life . Look closely at this photo and you'll see a team of horses in the background, hooked up to a furrow or a plow.  Berry, author of more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, has farmed a h...

This silence in the timbers. A woodpecker on one of the trees taps out its story . Robert Haigh t* Each tree, too, has its own story, its own family, its own tribe. And even though we do not know if they give their lives willingly, we could not live or breathe without them.   We fell them for their timber, for fuel for our fireplaces, and to grace our homes during the Christmas season.   W e thin them   to allow other nearby trees to mature and to help prevent insect infestation.    In the small mountain community where I live ,   hundreds of   Douglas fir and Ponderosa pines are being selectively felled for fire mitigation.   We are using the straightest of the “poles” to build a new barn for our community herd of horses, a bittersweet project because the trees must die.   But by this time next year, the barn will be built and the horses will be able to seek shelter on the leeward side, protected from the wind and rain an...