A Tribute to Wendell Berry | Geoff Oelsner

Wendell Berry, a truly wise man, died at age 92 on August 26. Let’s let him speak for himself on the topic of death right off. The following 4 part poem is from his book The Country of Marriage:

Testament

1.

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath

Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —

A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire

His surly art of imitating life; conspire

Against him. Say that my body cannot now

Be improved upon; it has no fault to show

To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh

Has a perfect compliance with the grass

Truer than any it could have striven for.

You will recognize the earth in me, as before

I wished to know it in myself: my earth

That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,

And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,

And all my hopes. Say that I have found

A good solution, and am on my way

To the roots. And say I have left my native clay

At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.

Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

2.

But do not let your ignorance

Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay

You, or overwhelm your thoughts.

Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever

Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger

Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought

Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous

To me and to yourselves. Why settle

For some know-it-all’s despair

When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?

And remember that the Heavenly soil

Need not be too rich to please

One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,

A new and better man, toward

That town. The thought’s unreasonable,

But so is life, thank the Lord!

3. 

So treat me, even dead,

As a man who has a place

To go, and something to do.

Don't muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge

As one would prettify

An unalterable fact

To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth

My body is and will be,

Admit its freedom and

Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes

I wore in the day's round.

Lay me in a wooden box.

Put the box in the ground.

4.

Beneath this stone a Berry is planted

In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,

Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,

But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool

By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter

Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do

They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice

Look on their peace, and rejoice.

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Take in (admit) this quote from Wendell's book of essays, The Long-Legged House:

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

What have been some of your most memorable experiences of the majesty of creation?  

How have you lived according to"the contrary assumption that what is good for the world is good for us" rather than vice versa?

We have to love the earth in order to care enough to want to help preserve the earth.  

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Here are 3 life-and-death-drenched Berry poems. The first is from his book A Part:

A Meeting

In a dream I meet 

my dead friend. He has, 

I know, gone long and far, 

and yet he is the same 

for the dead are changeless. 

They grow no older. 

It is I who have changed, 

grown strange to what I was. 

Yet I, the changed one, 

ask: "How you been?" 

He grins and looks at me.

"I been eating peaches 

off some mighty fine trees.”

Here’s a very grounding poem from Farming: A Handbook:

The Current

Having once put his hand into the ground,

seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,

a man has made a marriage with his place,

and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.

His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.

It has reached into the dark like a root

and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness.

a flickering sap coursing upward into his head

so that he sees the old tribespeople bend

in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening

to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,

their lodges and graves, and closing again.

He is made their descendant, what they left

in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.

And he sees the hearers of his own blood arriving,

the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,

their hands gathering the stones up into walls,

and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground

to lie still under the black wheels of machines.

The current flowing to him through the earth

flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,

a young man who has reached into the ground,

his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

Berry writes often of quiet, of the living silence.  This from the Collected Poems:

The Silence

Though the air is full of singing

my head is loud

with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich

with fruit, my tongue

hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden

I cannot stand beside it

mute, but must say

‘It is golden,

’ while the leaves

stir and fall with a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men’s silence

like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

My favorite Berry poem involving death and the afterlife is the incredible ( to my mind right up there with Virgil and Dante) long 8 part poem about visitations from dead friends,  "Elegy" from his book The Wheel.  I can’t find it to copy and paste from online. It’s in the Collected Poems, too.

Mr. Berry’s reverent writings are profoundly beautiful and crucial to the nth degree if you believe like I do that we MUST ALL find healthy ways to further conform our daily lives, and our agriculture, and our means of energy production to the changing reality of our natural ecosystems.

I am deeply grateful to have lived in the time of Wendell Berry—for his poems, for his life, and for the integrity with which his work turns our attention toward the living world.

In 1979, I read about Berry’s book of essays The Unsettling of America in the Whole Earth Catalogue, and got it delivered to the rural mailbox of our 40 acre homestead in Madison County, Arkansas. I’ve been reading his work— novels, stories, essays and poetry— ever since.

On Meeting the Great Man

In 2010 a friend and I drove 6 and 1/2 hours from where we live in NW Arkansas to hear Wendell and his daughter Mary speak at the annual Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.  He was joined by other speakers at the event, including Land Institute founder Wes Jackson.

Wes and his successors at the Land Institute have collaborated with other visionary agronomists, environmentalists, eco-activists, philosophers, historians, and photographers, artists and writers like Berry over the  past 5 decades on a massive research-demonstration project, the central practical focus of which is the gradual development of hardy, drought and insect resistant, soil-enhancing, erosion-preventive, high-yield perennial grains to replace more labor intensive, less soil-protective annual crops. 

This work is not being done via the same kind of genetic modification that Monsanto and other eco-thieves are so recklessly pursing, but by slow, patient observation of the growth patterns and productivity of many, many generations of carefully interbred varieties of naturally occurring grains. The Land Institute’s research and development has spread to over 36 countries now. For instance, Chinese agronomists have developed perennial rice varieties in recent years. If you'd like to know about the Land Institute and its essential work, you can go to www.landinstitute.org

Now, to my meeting with the great man: In his A Place on Earth, a novel originally published in 1967, Berry included a brief poem which one of the novel's characters recites over the grave of a fellow citizen in the close-knit farming community in Kentucky he’s written about again and again in his semi-autobiographical fiction. A few years earlier, I had put that poem to music and had played it a few times at gigs on harmonium, and prayed it at times silently, or sang it quietly and privately, after a death.

As I considered what I might say to Mr. Berry if I got an opportunity to meet him, I decided that I'd sing him my setting of his poem, as well as thanking him for his irreplaceable work. All of which I did, and I can yet see his eyes so alive and close to mine as l ululated the tune to him there on the dusky prairie at the end of his long day as a speaker and honored participant at the 2010 Land Institute gathering. 

Then we shook hands, I offered Wendell a heartfelt "thank you," and we we went on our ways.

Here is Jayber Crow’s graveside poem/chant from WB’s novel A Place on Earth:

Water into water Earth into earth

Breath into breath Light into light

Singing into singing Birth into birth

Thought into thought Sight into sight

May this man's makings be unmade

May stillness be  Let peace come

To this place that was a man

“He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep."

~ Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth

Thank you, Wendell.

Geoffrey Oelsner

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Berry Bonus

Here’s a long honoring obituary by Sara Ladd from the Kentucky Lantern written right after Berry’s death on August 31, 2026:

Kentucky writer and conservationist Wendell Berry once wrote: “Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.” 

A lover of forests, the farmer, author and former English professor died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, according to the New York Times and other media reports. He was 92.

Born in 1934 to Virginia Erdman and attorney John Marshall Berry, Wendell Berry was a prolific writer of nonfiction, poetry and fiction from Henry County, Kentucky. 

In dozens of books he wrote of the need to protect — and ethically use — land, of God as a part of nature and of modernity as a force to be rebelled against. 

Berry was a member of a group of Kentucky writers called the “Fab Five,” which included Bobbie Ann Mason and the late Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall and Ed McClanahan. 

He leaves behind a sprawling legacy of advocacy, conservationism, literary pursuit and protest that inspired people from the hills of Kentucky to Hollywood and beyond. 

His death leaves a vacancy of voice that was not always without controversy throughout his life but was decisive and steady throughout a long career. 

Tobacco and love of land 

Berry came from a long line of tobacco producers. John M. Berry, Wendell Berry’s father, co-founded the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Op in the 1920s, which stabilized the price of tobacco and helped farmers who’d been subject to the pricing impulses of the monopoly American Tobacco Company, according to a Bitter Southerner article.

“The brilliance of the program was that it successfully matched supply and demand, preventing farmers from falling victim to overproduction,” the Bitter Southerner article says. “Within this equilibrium, farmers in the co-op were guaranteed parity prices, which meant a price that compensated them for all of their inputs.” 

That article also quoted Mary Berry, daughter of Wendell Berry, as saying the co-op “was the only farm program that I know of that served the people it was supposed to serve, and that was small farmers. It was never a subsidy, it was a price support. It cost the government nothing.”

His family farmed in Henry County for generations. In a 1987 interview with the Kentucky Historical Society, Berry’s father said his great-grandfather bought 500 acres of land in the county after serving in the Army in the War of 1812. 

When Berry left New York City and returned home to Kentucky for good in the 1960s, he did so with “some fear and trembling, but also a sense of doing the right thing,” he told The New Yorker in 2019. 

When he started the trek home, with all his belongings in a Volkswagen Beetle, he told the New Yorker: “I felt a great, deep relief — as if I was following, at last, my true path.” 

‘Cheerful in dissent.’  

Berry was a man of many lanes. 

He protested the Vietnam War, saying in 1968 that “peace is more important than victory,” according to a Messenger Inquirer article from Feb. 11 of that year. 

Berry was arrested in 1979 for trespassing as he protested the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. In a 2010 CounterPunch conversation, he said of that day: “People asked if I wanted to be arrested and I said, ‘Hell No’ but I was willing to be.” 

In 2009, Berry joined thousands of people who marched in protest of the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., Inside Climate News reported at the time, in an effort to fight for cleaner emissions. 

He echoed the same trepidation and resolve about the prospect of arrest: “Somebody asked me if I wanted to get arrested. The answer is very brief: No. But I’m willing to get arrested. Nothing else is working.”

The farmer fought to preserve a controversial piece of University of Kentucky art condemned as racist for many years and pushed back against mountaintop removal by joining a sit-in at former Gov. Steve Beshear’s office in 2011. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities described him in 2012 as “cheerful in dissent” and a person who “writes to document and defend what is being lost to the forces of modernization, and to explain how he lives and what he thinks.” 

The Berry Center was established in 2011 to put “Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.” 

The nonprofit works to bring “focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.” 

The center educates farmers “in agrarian thought and practice,” runs a bookstore, has a cooperative to help farmers sell to markets and more.  

The work is in line with Berry’s legacy of advocacy for land preservation and agrarian life.  

Berry and the University of Kentucky

Berry had a complicated relationship with his alma mater, the University of Kentucky.

He earned his bachelor and master’s degrees in English from UK, according to the Kentucky Historical Society. He then taught at the University of Kentucky from 1964-1977 and again from 1987-1993. (His teaching roster also includes Stanford University, Georgetown College, New York University, the University of Cincinnati and Bucknell University). 

In late 2009, Berry withdrew papers he’d loaned UK, a quiet protest against the university’s acceptance of $7 million from coal producer and philanthropist Joe Craft to rename a residence hall the “Wildcat Coal Lodge.” 

The Kentucky Kernel, the independent student newspaper at UK, reported that Berry could not abide what he considered an indignity as an advocate for the land and water polluted by mining. 

“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” the Kernel quoted Berry as saying. “In the long run, the top soil, the forests and the woodland of this state will be more valuable than the coal deposits.”

Berry felt the university’s move was a split from his values and those held by other farmers. 

“When the university accepted the gift from (the) coal industry in return for naming the basketball dormitory ‘Wildcat Coal Lodge,’ the university had sold an advertisement,” Berry said, according to the Kernel. 

That wasn’t the only time Berry and UK clashed. 

In July 2020, Berry joined a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky seeking to preserve a controversial 1934 fresco mural many criticised for its depictions of slavery in America and of Indigenous people. 

Ann Rice O’Hanlon painted the fresco as part of the Public Works of Art Project and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

It was a site for  protests on campus and requests to have it removed for years. According to court documents, complaints began in the 1970s. 

University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto agreed to cover the mural in 2019 following a sit-in protest on campus that included the Black Student Advisory Council and others. In June 2020, seemingly moved by the racial justice movement sweeping through the country, he announced the university would remove it. 

The next month, Berry stepped in and asked a court to halt the removal. In court documents from the time, Berry argued the art needed to be conserved because of its historical significance, difficulty to create and rarity, being one of around 42 frescos from the time. 

“The O’Hanlon Mural is a figurative representation of the history of Lexington and Central Kentucky,” Berry’s petition read.

He wrote of her “artistic choices that abstract the essential truths of the art as opposed to mere representation,” which he said “is part of what makes the O’Hanlon Mural unique and a valuable piece of the cultural assets of Kentucky held in trust by the University.”

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January 2026 that the mural remains in its place on campus.

‘Radical and eclectic’  

The late Bell Hooks, a renowned Kentucky author known for her many writings on feminist theory, racism and love, among other topics, wrote fondly of Berry in “belonging: a culture of place,” one of some 40 books she published throughout her career. 

She praised him for the “wide range of issues in his essays that were fundamentally radical and eclectic.” She taught at Berea College from his book about race, “The Hidden Wound.” 

Berry also inspired actor and writer Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation fame. Offerman, himself an outdoorsman, has narrated several of Berry’s books for audiobook format, including his magnum opus, “The Unsettling of America.” 

In a 2020 interview with Literary Hub, Offerman said in Berry he “unexpectedly found a chronicler of the nobility found in good, honest work, and thrift, and affection for one’s family and neighbors and animals and the land that supports and nourishes all of the above.” 

“I have often asserted that if my job were simply to broadcast the works of Wendell Berry to the world, I’d die a happy man,” Offerman said in that interview.

Honors

Former President Barack Obama awarded Berry with the 2010 National Humanities Medal for his work as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. 

He also earned other notable honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, according to the Poetry Foundation. 

In 1961, he traveled in France and Italy as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious honor for “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form under the freest possible conditions.” The Fellowship has gone to other notable writers including Ada Limón, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado and Sigrid Nunez. 

His slew of other honors include the Kentucky Libraries Award’ for Intellectual Excellence, the Thomas Merton Award, The Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers,  the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from The American Academy of Religion, the Poets’ Prize and others. 

For a list of Berry’s books, visit this site.