Subtitled Embracing Place and Possibility, this poem charts it's course through some very familiar themes in Wendell Berry's writing more generally. That hope is not something you can abstractly acquire. Hope arises from having had a strong sense of the place from which you have sprung, and it's future that you care for. It's a landscape that has to a large extent made you who you are. Without this we find ourselves adrift, anchorless, most likely these days alienated and imaginatively ungrounded. Where everything we might express about hope is an idea remote from lived experience. Wendell Berry's tone when he is reciting this, is even, breaking the lines of this poem where it will bring it greater import. Shifting the focus from person to place, meaning to emptiness, hope to despair, that cycle around to come back at you from a different angle. There is both clarity and mystery being woven here. Like his writing his reading aloud is strong on precision with an understated feeling tone.
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