At A Country Funeral
Wendell Berry
Now the old ways that have brought us
farther than we remember sink out of sight
as under the treading of many strangers
ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
they are cast clear again upon the mind
as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighborhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last
of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.
They stand and think as they stood and thought
when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous
as for somebody else’s grief, has its source
in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my
self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
to the world. The fields and the work
remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
of one of the old ones into the Rock
too often means a lifework perished from the land
without inheritor, and the field goes wild
and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
for the blood kin to gather, come home
for one last time, to hear old men
whose tongues bear an essential topography
speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed
is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge
of what has died. What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is no
other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
a second and more final death.
(...)
Pero nuestra memoria, duramente obtenida,
es una de las semillas de la tierra, como semilla
es la memoria de la vida de su gente en su lugar,
para continuar como vida el conocimiento
de lo que ha muerto. Lo que debemos al futuro
no es un nuevo comienzo, porque solo podemos comenzar
con lo que sucedió.Debemos al futuro
el pasado, el alargado conocimiento
que es la potencia del tiempo por venir.
Ello hace de la tumba de un hombre un rico surco.
La comunidad del conocer en común es la semilla
de nuestra vida en este este lugar.No solo no hay
mejor posibilidad, no hay ninguna
otra, excepto el caos y la oscuridad,
el suelo terrible del únicamente posible
nuevo comienzo.Y así cuando los viejos mueren y los jóvenes
abandonan, dónde irá un hombre que guarda
las memorias de los muertos, excepto a casa
de nuevo, como iría de vuelta tras un entierro,
fiel a los campos, para que los muertos no vivan
una segunda y definitiva muerte.
(traducción Guillermo G. Ruiz Zapatero)
