The Foreword to the new book “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition.”
After Thirty Years: An Anniversary Poem
October 8, 2014
Week’s end: browning our penitential trout,
My wife hums and weaves to “The Sloop John B.”
In tripping back the past, what does she see?
Which boys? What beach? I take the chilled wine out,
Return her smile. Marriage is mystery
(Sacramentum); to not know is not doubt.
It is, rather, to wonder: Not about
What was or might be yet—quick jealousy
That mimics love, reducing we to me.
No, we’d reclaim an old, neglected route
In a shrill fog where needles disagree
On what’s true north, nations rage, vegans pout,
For One Unseen has wrapped his bleeding hands with ours
And tugs us past dim principalities and powers.
— William Bedford Clark
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