Berry.4

The end of his poem, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," in which he insists that we not always act predictably and rationally, Berry writes,

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.


Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?


Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.


As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.


Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Berry has us look to women who value childbearing as the model of what is to be valued (Berry's point overlaps interestingly with Rousseau's assertion that we should educate women to desire well because the way that women desire, men will act). Life, then, for Berry, is oriented toward fecundity and future birth (at another point in the poem, Berry suggests that the reader plant Sequoias). Hope is essential to this project of looking toward the future in anticipation of what you might bear and create in it.