The Lucky Poor (Peterson)

“Blessed are the poor in spirit”

A beech tree in winter, white

Intricacies unconcealed

Against sky blue and billowed

Clouds, carries in its emptiness

Ripeness: sap ready to rise

On signal, buds alert to burst

To leaf. And then after a season

Of summer a lean ring to remember

The lush fulfilled promises.

Empty again in wise poverty

That lets the reaching branches stretch

A millimetre more towards heaven,

The bole expand ever so slightly

And push roots into the firm

Foundation, lucky to be leafless:

Deciduous reminder to let it go.

(from Holy Luck: Selected Poems, © 2012 by Eugene H Peterson) 

After the bitter nights

After the bitter nights
and the gray, cold days
comes a bright afternoon.
I go into the creek valley
and there are the horses, the black
and the white, lying in the warm
shine on a bed of dry hay.
They lie side by side,
identically posed as a painter
might imagine them:
heads up, ears and eyes
alert. They are beautiful in the light
and in the warmth happy. Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded
within the world. It is
the way the world is sometimes.

Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poems, 2008 (1)