He lived through many years of oppression at the hands of both the Germans and the Russians, and only chose to defect once it was impossible for him to remain in Warsaw. He experienced the German invasion of his hometown when a teen during WWI, and witnessed Nazi soldiers burning down Warsaw in August 1944. He has written,
----“I do not regret those years in Warsaw, which was, I believe,
----the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe. Had
----I chosen emigration, my life would certainly have followed a
----very different course. But my knowledge of the crimes which
----Europe has witnessed in the twentieth century would be less
----direct, less concrete than it is.”
He accepted a post at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, and lived in a cottage overlooking the bay for forty years. Even so, he continued writing his poetry in Polish, often about his experiences in Poland, and about aspects of life his European experience stirred in him. In his book of essays Visions from San Franscico Bay his faith is well-declared when he says,
----“There is the warm, human presence of a God who took on flesh
----in order to experience our hunger and our pain, so we would
----not be doomed to strain our eyes upward but could be nourished
----by words spoken by lips like our own. And the God-man is not
----one of us in our moments of pride and glory but one of us in
----misfortune, in slavery, and in the fear of death. The hour
----when he agreed to accept suffering conquers time; centuries
----of change and passing civilizations are insignificant and
----short-lived, and no wasteland of cement, glass, and metal will
----make man different from those men Christ addressed in Galilee…”
The following poem was translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Veni Creator
Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lifts its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.
*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Wendell Berry: first post, second post.
Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.
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