Prompt: Window Poems

“The world is greater than our words. To speak of it the mind must bend.” Wendell Berry

I hope you are doing well. Fantastic responses to the Kahlil Gibran prompt with your poetic parables!

This week, I’d love to consider a living poet, Wendell Berry as inspiration for a prompt.

The New Yorker did a nice piece on Berry that can give you a good sense of who the mystical Kentucky farmer-poet is as a person if you want to know a bit of his backstory.

I picked up his Selected Poems, works from 1957–1996 — spectacular. I think the best way to give an introduction is to look at one group called Window Poems, written from a small cabin where Berry would (and still does) retreat to write.

Several things jump out to me.

First, Berry writes of himself in third person, “the man of the window,” as if he is part of the natural world he loves, looking into the window at the strange human. The desire for detachment and conflict with his humanity is a common theme. He considers himself, at his best, a part of the world.

“The earth turns agains all living, in the end. And when the mind has not outraged itself against its nature, they die and become the place they lived in.”

Second, like so many of the other great poets we have been looking at, Berry is a master of observation. The descriptions are simple, but within, he buries elegant, profound verses. I can’t imagine reading the complete poems without a highlighter. It’s a good reminder to focus on simplicity in my writing and to let any conclusions emerge naturally from my observations, not to force profound insight to occur.

“What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.”

Third, Berry writes 27 unique poems in this collection about his window!

If something moves me, why shouldn’t I think about it and revisit again and again in different ways. Why not have a muse, even a simple muse like a window?

Prompt: Write your own Window Poems — what is outside your window?

What do you see, what do you feel? How does your world outside your window affect you?

Write a series of poems around the theme to explore your creativity.

I look forward to what you come up with! Please let me know in the comments if you would like to be added as a writer.

Note: Medium is sending me 9 out of 10 notifications about submissions — most of the time, but not always. Compounding this, there’s not a great way to find missing submissions through a mobile device, which is how I publish most of your work. If I don’t publish your poem within 48 hours, please send me a note through Medium or email me at [email protected]. My apologies to those who I’ve let down in the past weeks.

Below are excerpts from some of the Window Poems that resonated with me — really excited to see what you think.

Instead of stock pics, I used pictures outside my windows in the past years, mostly taken in East Africa. If you’re a botanist, don’t judge me too harshly — I know these are different plants from what grows in Kentucky!

Excerpts from Window Poems by Wendell Berry

#3

The window has forty panes, forty clarities variously wrinkled, streaked with dried rain, smudged, dusted.

The frame is a black grid beyond which the world flings up the wild graph of its growth, tree branch, river, slope of land, the river passing downward, the clouds blowing, usually, from the west, the opposite way.

The window is a form of consciousness, pattern of formed sense through which to look into the wild that is a pattern too, but dark and flowing, bearing along the little shapes of the mind as the river bears a sash of some blinded house.

This windy day on one of the panes a blown seed, caught in cobweb, beats and beats.

#4

In the low room within the weathers, sitting at the window, he has shed himself at times, and been renewed.

The spark at his wrist flickers and dies, flickers and dies. The life in him grows and subsides and grows again like the icicle throbbing winter after winter at a wrinkle in the eave, flowing over itself as it comes and goes, fluid as a branch.

#5

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides — and he let go what he was not.

But there are mornings when his soul emerges from darkness as out of a hollow in a tree high on the crest and takes flight with savage joy and harsh outcry down the long slope of the leaves.

And nights when he sleeps sweating under the burden of the hill.

What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods.

He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

#7

They snatch what they can carry and fly into the trees. They flirt out with tail or beak and waste more sometimes than they eat. And the man, knowing the price of seed, wishes they would take more care.

But they understand only what is free, and he can give only as they will take. Thus they have enlightened him. He buys the seed, to make it free.

#12

When the fools of the capitals have devoured each other in righteousness, and the machines have eaten the rest of us, then there will be the second coming of the trees.

#15

How often the man of the window has studied its motley trunk, the out-starting of its branches, its smooth crotches, its revelations of whiteness, hoping to see beyond his glances, the distorting geometry of preconception and habit, to know it beyond words.

All he has learned of it does not add up to it.

The world is greater than our words.

To speak of it the mind must bend.

#18

The window grows fragile in a time of war. The man seated beneath it feels its glass turn deadly. He feels the nakedness of his face and throat. Its shards and splinters balance in transparence, delicately seamed. In the violence of men against men, it will not last. In any mind turned away in hate, it will go blind. Men spare one another by will. When there is hate it is joyous to kill. And he has borne the hunger to destroy, riding anger like a captain, savage, exalted and blind. There is war in his veins like a loud song. He has known his heart to rise in glad holocaust against his kind, and felt hard in thigh and arm the thew of fury.

#19

Peace.

Let men, who cannot be brothers to themselves, be brothers to mulleins and daisies that have learned to live on the earth.

Peace.

The earth turns against all living, in the end. And when mind has not outraged itself against its nature, they die and become the place they lived in.

Peace to the bones that walk in the sun toward death, for they will come to it soon enough.

Peace to the porch and the garden.

Peace to the man in the window.

#20

He said: If we, who have killed our brothers and hated ourselves, are made in the image of God, then surely the bloodroot, wild phlox, trillium, and mayapple are more truly made in God’s image, for they have desired to be no more than they are, and they have spared each other.

Their future is undiminished by their past. Let me, he said in his dream, become always less a soldier and more a man, for what is unopened in the ground is pledged to peace.

23.

He stood on the ground and saw his wife borne away in the air, and suddenly knew her. It is not the sky he trusts her to, or her flight, but to herself as he saw her turn back and smile. And he turned back to the buried garden where the spring flood rose. The window is made strange by these days he has come to. She is the comfort of the rooms she leaves behind her.

24.

His love returns and walks among the trees, a new time lying beneath the leaves at her feet. There are songs in the ground audible to her. She enters the dark globe of sleep, waking the tree frogs whose songs star the silence in constellations. She wakens the birds of mornings. The sun makes a low gentle piping. The bloodroot rises in its folded leaf, and there is a tensing in the woods. There is no window where she is. All is clear where the light begins to dress the branch in green.

#27

The watcher leaves his window and goes out. He sits in the woods, watched by more than he sees. What is his past. He has come to a roofless place and a windowless. There is a wild light his mind loses until the spring renews, but it holds his mind and will not let it rest. The window is a fragment of the world suspended in the world, the known adrift in mystery. And now the green rises The window has an edge that is celestial, where the eyes are surpassed.

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