Wendell Berry: "Sabbaths 2001, VIII"

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he's alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

"Sabbaths 2001, VIII" by Wendell Berry. Published in Poetry, October/November 2002.

Image credit: "Curtain, Jug and Fruit," oil on canvas, by Paul Cézanne, 1894 (originally color).