Amish Economy.

   We live by mercy if we live.
   To that we have no fit reply
   But working well and giving thanks,
   Loving God, loving one another,
   To keep Creation's neighborhood.

   And my friend David Kline told me,
   "It falls strangely on Amish ears,
   This talk of how you find yourself.
   We Amish, after all don't try
   To find ourselves. We try to lose
   Ourselves"--and thus are lost within
   The found world of sunshine and rain
   Where fields are green and then are ripe,
   And the people eat together by
   The charity of God, who is kind
   Even to those who give no thanks.

   In morning light, men in dark clothes
   Go out among the beasts and fields.
   Lest the community be lost
   Each day they must work out the bond
   Between the goods and their price: the garden
   Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
   The wheat shocked in shorn fields, clover
   Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
   Is golden with the gathered corn,

   While in the world of the found selves,
   Lost to the sunlit rainy world,
   The motor-driven cannot stop.
   This is the world where value is
   Abstract, and preys on things, and things
   Are changed to thoughts that have a price.
   Cost + greed - fear = price:
   Maury Telleen thus laid it out.
   The need to balance greed and fear
   Affords no stopping place, no rest
   And need increases as we fail.

   But now, in summer dusk, a man
   Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
   Sits under the yard trees, at rest
   His smallest daughter on his lap.
   This is because he rose at dawn,
   Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
   Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

From the book A Timbered Choir, [C] 1998 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted with permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved.

   It is the destruction of the world
   in our own lives that drives us
   half insane, and more than half.
   To destroy that which we were given
   in trust: how will we bear it?
   It is our own bodies that we give
   to be broken, our bodies
   existing before and after us
   in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
   that we, driving or driven, despise
   in our greed to live, our haste
   to die. To have lost, wantonly,
   the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
   is our madness, the presence
   in our very bodies of our grief.

From the book A Timbered Choir, [C] 1998 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted with permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved.3