Things get broken at home like they were pushed by an invisible, deliberate smasher. It's not my hands or yours It wasn't the girls with their hard fingernails or the motion of the planet. It wasn't anything or anybody It wasn't the wind It wasn't the orange-colored noontime Or night over the earth It wasn't even the nose or the elbow Or the hips getting bigger or the ankle or the air. The plate broke, the lamp fell All the flower pots tumbled over one by one. That pot which overflowed with scarlet in the middle of October, it got tired from all the violets and another empty one rolled round and round and round all through winter until it was only the powder of a flowerpot, a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock whose sound was the voice of our lives, the secret thread of our weeks, which released one by one, so many hours for honey and silence for so many births and jobs, that clock also fell and its delicate blue guts vibrated among the broken glass its wide heart unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up glass, wearing out clothes making fragments breaking down forms and what lasts through time is like an island on a ship in the sea, perishable surrounded by dangerous fragility by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together -- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold -- into a sack and carry them to the sea and let our possessions sink into one alarming breaker that sounds like a river. May whatever breaks be reconstructed by the sea with the long labor of its tides. So many useless things which nobody broke but which got broken anyway.

Well I have and in fact more than one and I'll tell you this too

I wrote one against Algeria that nightmare and another against

Korea and another against the one I was in

and I don't remember how many against the three

when I was a boy Abyssinia Spain and Harlan County

and not one breath was restored to one

shattered throat mans womans or childs not one not

one but death went on and on never looking aside

except now and then with a furtive half-smile to make sure I was noticing.

... Notes:

Wendell Berry in his book of essays, "What Are People For?" calls this poem, "a poem of difficult hope". In an essay with the same title, Berry, after noting that while this poem appears to give a negative reply to the question, "Why do something that you suspect, with reason, will do no good?", writes

"In the first place, the distinguishing characteristic of absolute despair is silence. There is a world of difference between the person, who believing that there is no use, says so to himself or to no one, and the person who says it aloud to someone else. A person who marks his trail into despair remembers hope - and thus hopes, even if only little".

Berry goes on to discuss the structure, the syntax, and other mechanics of Carruth's language that make this seemingly unobtrusive poem masterful, and then circles backs to the question he posed at the beginning of the essay, "Why has this poet expended so much skill and care to tell us there is no use doing what he has already done a number of time and is no, in fact, doing again?" To this question, Berry posits that, while history has little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use, protest endures because it is animated by a hope far more modest than public success: the hope of preserving the qualities of one's own heart and spirit from the destruction that can come from silent acquiescence. Berry, concludes the essay, by saying:

"But something more is involved that is even harder to talk about because it is only slightly understandable, and that is the part that suffering plays in the economy of the spirit. It seems plain that the voice of our despair defines our hope exactly; it seems, indeed, that we cannot know of hope without knowing of despair, just as we know joy precisely to the extent that we know of sorrow."

...

I reached for this poem and Wendell Berry's essay on it when I saw the photos of the latest destruction – those of thirty or so incinerated dead children - earlier today. Perhaps it will be of some use in giving hope to the equally distant others as well.