In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
I.
The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves,
one of the necessities, so they may
speak what is true, and have
the patience for beauty: the weighted
grainfield, the shady street,
the well-laid stone and the changing tree
whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories
they have dug away the soil,
paved over what is left,
set up their perfunctory walls
in tribute to no god,
for the love of no man or woman,
so that the good that was here
cannot be called back
except by long waiting, by great
sorrows remembered and to come
by invoking the thunderstones
of the world, and the vivid air.
II.
The poem is important,
as the want of it
proves. It is the stewardship
of its own possibility,
the past remembering itself
in the presence of
the present, the power learned
and handed down to see
what is present
and what is not: the pavement
laid down and walked over
regardlessly--by exiles, here
only because they are passing.
Oh, remember the oaks that were
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poem by Wendell Berry
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