Poetry Friday

For Wendell Berry, 1934–2026

Wendell Berry died this week, at the age of 92.

Berry wrote so beautifully about the things we cannot hold on to — people, places, seasons, the natural world — without ever suggesting that loving them was therefore futile. If anything, his work seemed to say the opposite: that our impermanence is one of the reasons we should pay attention, care for what is here, and love it while we can.

I have returned to his writing many times over the years, but this is one of my favourite poems of his – The Loved Ones.

I have found deep comfort in its understanding of absence: the thought that those we have loved and lost have not simply disappeared from our lives, but remain somehow close to us arriving unexpectedly in dreams, memories, and ordinary moments.

And then that extraordinary reversal at the end:

“We are the absent ones.”