Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, July 23, 2025.

Today's poem is by Wendell Berry, and it's called A Parting.

I was reminded of this poem recently by a friend, and I'm so glad because I love it.

It's a beautiful poem, and it distills so much of what is wonderful about Wendell Berry's

personal philosophy and about his fiction. And it presents the human being, at least a human

being who's lived well at the end of their life as a kind of conduit

to the past, to a different world, a different time, a different place. But this poem also always

reminds me of the inverse and the way that saints and very saintly people at the end of their life, they become a kind of conduit to

eternity. There's something transcendent. There's something future that we can touch through them

and by being in their presence. And both of these phenomena are excellent reasons not to hide away those who have stored up this great richness within themselves at the precise moment when it is most tangible to the rest of us.

Here is a parting.

For many hard work days in the fields, many passages through the woods, many mornings on the

river, lifting hooked lines out of the dark from many nightfalls, many dawns, on the ridgetops

and the creek road, as upright as a tree, as freely standing. Arthur Roanberry comes in his old age,

into the care of doctors, into the prison of technical mercy, disease and heretic skill

making their way in his body, hungry invaders fighting for claims in that dark homeland,

strangers touching him, calling his name.

And so he lies down at last in a bare room far from home. And we who know him come from the places

he knew us in and stand by his bed and speak. He smiles and greets us from another time. We stand around him like a grove,

a moment's shelter, old neighborhood remade in that alien place. But the time we stand in

is not his time. He is off in the places of his life, now only places in his mind, doing what he did in them when

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