The Mad Farmer's Wife Poems

The Mad Farmer's Wife is a response to a life lived on a mountain cattle farm in Southwest Virginia and also to a poetic persona created by noted Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry over thirty years ago: the Mad Farmer. In a world increasingly detached from the land that supplies our all our essential resources, The Mad Farmer's Wife tries to help us understand the complexity and challenge of living that life in today's economy and the dark life and death struggles that are a routine part of farm living.



Prayer of the Mad Farmer's Wife



May the weeds grow into heart-shaped hedges

Giving symmetry and order to ragged fields

That August sun has turned loose and ugly

Let sunburned calves and their tired mothers

Find a pool of winter–cool shade

Between woods and creek at our world's edge.

I am lost on a heat-shimmering quilt

Just yards from an open door where

My children watch for the relief of nightfall

And aimless bees and flies look to me

Saying, "You must know something."

Let there be silence once again

As voices dwindle to snowsoft murmur

My life rising anew from behind the mountain.