beauty of the living world

 

 

 

 

 

 

The yellow-throated warbler, the highest remotest voice

of this place, sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores,

but one day he came twice to the railing of my porch

where I sat at work above the river. He was too close

to see with binoculars. Only the naked eye could take him in,

a bird more beautiful than every picture of himself,

more beautiful than himself killed and preserved

by the most skilled taxidermist, more beautiful

than any human mind, so small and inexact,

could hope ever to remember. My mind became

beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only

of himself alive in the only moment of his life.

He had upon him like the whole

beauty of the living world that never dies.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Wendell Berry

from Given Poems

(for Jonathan Williams)  

Photo by Dan Dehm