Two Sides to Every Coin

Every have one of these days, or nights? First, Things; then there is Peace.


Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.

- by Fleur Adcock, from Selected Poems. © Oxford University Press, 1986



The Peace of Wild Things

When the despair of the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's life may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with the forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the sun-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- by Wendell Berry

I thank The Writer's Almanac for "Things" and MC for "The Peace of Wild Things."