This was back when legit hippies would hand you books, and that’s how I got my first volume of Berry’s Collected Poems, a garish green hardback, published in 1988. I read it, loved it, and passed it on to someone else, as we did back before the internet spread all the wonders for us.

Yep, I just casually handed off a first edition of Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems and said, “Some farmer from Henry County. He’s really good.”

“Henry County?”

“Just read it.”

In Kentucky, counties matter more than anywhere else I’ve lived since. Good poets didn’t come from Henry County. This was a freak of nature like the Donkey Tree in Washington County, one county over.

This was also twenty-six years before Wendell Berry was the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writer’s Hall of Fame and twenty-one years before Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.

In 1989, the correct answer to “Who is this guy,” was “Some farmer from Henry County.”

To get to Henry County, you go straight up through Spencer County, through Shelby County (where all the tornado warnings always hit), just to the east of Louisville (Luahvul), and there you are.

I’m telling you, Wendell Berry was our people. He was so much our people, not many of us knew quite what to think of him in 1989.

I remember two hillbillies on Looney Tunes. They were barefoot, drinking, dancing fools. That’s what the world thought of Kentucky. We were the punchline of an international joke.

While one of my best friends was studying Latin at Eton, I was stripping tobacco in a dirty barn. Every once in a while, the old men would smash a tarry black knuckle against a nostril and shoot a black, slimy dust booger out the other nostril into the dirt. I never saw that happen when I wasn’t impressed, but people didn’t write good poems about tobacco dust boogers, and good poets didn’t come from Henry County, Kentucky.

When I was nineteen, I got a crush on Wendell Berry. It hit the night I went to one of his live, local readings. The movement of his hands did it.

I went that night knowing the man was a farmer, but I guess I’d somehow expected him to have poet hands. He did not. Even from several rows back, I could tell that his hands looked all wrong behind the podium. They held that stack of papers like my dad would hold the paper dolls I’d made out of tissue paper and glue—gently but not comfortably.

Something about Berry’s grip on that paper changed how I saw poetry forever. I’d watched so many other readings in which poets approached a podium with gravitas, in awe of The Poem and The Reading and the Sounds of Their Own Voices and (to borrow a Substacker’s phrase) being a Serious Literary Writer. Berry held his poem like it was a strange but necessary tool for doing the work a poem had to do.

I waited to talk to him after the reading, and he shook my hand. I had no idea what a young woman should say to a farmer poet from Henry County that she had just fallen a little bit in love with. So, in the two quick seconds that my hand was touching Wendell Berry’s hand, I managed to say something ridiculous.

“You’re not wearing a watch.” I heard this weird declaration emerge from my own mouth soft as a whisper. The nerves had eaten my voice. Berry asked me to repeat my question. I did.

He smiled and said, “Why would I strap something so powerful as time upon my wrist?”

I suppose he was teasing me, but I was nineteen, and giddy, and scared.

“Uh guhhhh uh um I uh,” I said. “Um guh erf, I uh—time is scary.” Then I ran away like Napoleon Dynamite fleeing a stage, floated back to my dorm, and swore to never wash my hand again.

Later that week, I bought an illegal hamster to hide in my dorm room. I named it Wendell Berry.

Yes. I named an illegal, industry-bred rodent in a cage with a plastic water bottle and weird food that I bought in synthetic boxes from massive retail stores Wendell Berry.

Love makes you stupid.

Whatever crazy that was passed, and I married a man from Washington County with farming hands. From the moment I introduced him to Berry’s writings, my husband was a goner. The day before I turned 35, Berry was doing a local reading, so we went together.

This time, I cried listening to the farmer poet speak. It was a weird season of life. I was no longer young and giddy. I was a mom, and I was tired, and the world had changed, and the church was churning, and I think I was probably scared of things I could feel coming but didn’t understand.

Sleep was impossible.

Once again, we waited in line to meet Wendell Berry. When I shook his hand, I asked him to sign my favorite book and opened it for him.

“Why this page?” he asked.

“Because I can never sleep,” I said.

He smiled, took my book, and wrote: “For Rebecca. May she have good thoughts, if not good dreams. Wendell Berry.”

I still can’t sleep. Because of that, I have thought about Berry’s blessing so many times over the years. In fact, his words followed me into the most difficult creative endeavor of my life—five-years of working out a line-by-line prose rendering of Edmund Spenser’s 1590s poem The Faerie Queene.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a commercial for my books. There’s another reason I need to explain this part of my story. You’ll see.

The Faerie Queene is over 30,000 lines, and it’s much harder to read than Shakespeare. This was the sort of project that required insomnia. (Fools rush in where angels and people who sleep seven hours every night fear to tread.) Yet, Wendell Berry had blessed me with good thoughts if not good dreams. I could pour all my restlessness into the work. I could make something beautiful out of the shadows.

And, here’s where the story gets sweeter.

Spenser’s poem ends with what C.S. Lewis considered the best ending for any poem ever written, a stunning reference to our coming Sabbath rest. It sits inside of a fragment found after Spenser died, a miraculous discovery that becomes more beautiful the more you learn about the poet and his world.

I rarely hear anyone mention Edmund Spenser at all, and I have never heard anyone else mention this particular bit of the Faerie Queene, so I was shocked to find it planted in the rows of one of Wendell Berry’s final books. My husband found the quote first, and he handed me the open page. I just stood there staring, trying to process the fact that an old farmer from Henry County, Kentucky had chosen my favorite few lines out of thirty thousand possibilities. He’d chosen these from a found, unfinished scrap of a four-hundred-year-old poem that most people who read the epic never bother to study. He'd chosen lines honoring a rest that will surely come, even if we cannot have it fully now.

I wanted to drive to Berry's farm and tell him about all this. I wanted to show him my books and what had come of all of my not sleeping. I wanted to let him know that I loved The Faerie Queene, too, and where all the good thoughts he had blessed me with had converged, and how a little sentence he had planted a long time ago had grown until you could harvest it and eat it.

You know what it’s like when a piece of music returns to its main theme after a movement of dissonance. While writing, I had often felt lost and alone, but here was Wendell Berry handing me assurance that I’d followed his blessing all the way home.

All my life, I’ve heard people say, “Rest in peace” when someone dies. Those words ring differently in me tonight. Wendell Berry understood Sabbath rest. He knew it well enough to spend his life leaving a trail of hope and purpose for restless people like me to follow.

Writing is lonely work. We do so much of it in isolation, wondering if we can connect to anyone ever, or if our words are just banging around like rocks in a can. A dear farmer from Henry County helped me know what to do with all this. I’m so thankful.

Dear Wendell, the shadows have at last shuddered and broken open for you. The Sabbath light shines in every leaf. I am grateful for the hope. I am grateful for the blessing.

Maybe we will live three counties over again someday. I hope so.

May your Sabbath rest be merry.

watched her skin turn to gauze,

felt the pace of her cramps slow

like an old man’s heart giving out,

her ovum waning.

-

Full moons no longer marked the day

she would feel the sink of confirmation

that hope was for the young,

but mostly for the others.

-

A woman is born with all her eggs;

they blossom and ripen and feed

or fall, but from the womb

in which she slept,

she sleeps with hope of life

sleeping in her ovaries.

-

She sheds this hope through pain,

through blood, through the superstition

and scorn of men who draw blood

through giddy violence

yet wretch and shun the blood

life costs every woman, their mothers,

their daughters, and the barren.

-

How cruel that this rite must be borne

by those who will not bear.

How right it seems that the old woman,

after all this, laughed.

Sarah, no longer waiting for Godot,

felt a new pinch in her old left ovary,

thought for a second it felt familiar.

Her old man smelled like an old man,

she thought, then willed herself to overlook,

lingered in a withered kiss long enough

to laugh and call him an old fool,

long enough to get a little crazy

under a new moon

while the sheep gossiped

in their sleep.

-

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

The ovaries of our tired planet are emptied,

dried up, burning. The skies are brown.

The kings are mad. Full moons still come,

still taunt us. We are sick from hope deferred.

- We are ninety-nine,

counting liver spots

despite the pinch,

despite the promise,

despite all those million stars holding

promise as our butter soft moon

waxes and wanes.

This accumulation
won’t be measured in inches of rain,
but in years of trust falls gone wrong
after being once young and giddy sure,
Hallmark expectant, then falling
with style, hitting the earth, again and again
and again.

I was trying to think it through. Trying to will the will
to stand at the edge of another precipice and pray
without fists clenched. Just pray. But what comes
is, “Why have you forsaken me?” Which,
of course, He hasn’t.
Still, though, I’m not the righteous man
whose prayers availeth much.
I was never good at math.

Yet, the onslaught, the onslaught, the onslaught,
the hitting the earth again and again, the headache,
the animal instinct to fight drowning. I’m tired of the shame
of weary survival.

Two baby deer in the yard. Still spotted. Gentle and new,
I wiped the tears off my cheeks and saw this young life,
a metaphor—a wink I hoped. I would find the meaning.

Took an entire breath, and then
the third fawn came. Limping. Front right paw dangling
and my ribs were molten iron. Don’t fall, baby. She’ll never
make it. My God, there’s a prayer.
Oh, Jesus. This baby has a broken foot.

I know that if someone will save her, it will have to be me,
and with my own two firstborn hands,
and this makes me angry.
Furious.

I won’t be able to catch her. I will fail. She will try to run
and be terrified, and wild, and in pain, and I will fail.
And she will still limp. And she will still fall. And she will still die.
An entire life.
I am nothing divine.

What sort of prayers are to be prayed at the end of young trust?
I believe too much to unbelieve.
I have tested too much to deconstruct.
But how it hurts to live in a world like this.
How every collision takes all your air away
as your body flattens against the ground.

And why must that little deer be broken?
How did she break her tiny foot?
Were you there, God of sparrows
when the fatal wound fell upon her?
How did You manage
to hold back your Hand?
And did you weep to see it
like I weep?

Oh God, see her little spots,
cold snow on dried clay.