From This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry

2007

II

The nation is a boat,
as some have said, ourselves
its passengers. How troubling
now to ride it drifting
down the flow from the old
high vision of dignity, freedom,
holy writ of habeas corpus,
and the land's abundance--down
to waste, want, fear, tyranny,
torture, caricature
of vision in a characterless time,
while the abyss whirls below.


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