Oil painting with a woman in a medium blue dress and dark blue wrap leans over a chaise lounge. She holds a mirror. Her dark hair is piled in a bun on top of her head and she looks pensively off the edge of the canvas.

Poetry for Us — The Blue Robe

The Blue Robe

By Wendell Berry

How joyful to be together, alone
as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves:
how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,
old friend in the morning light,
beautiful in her blue robe!

“The Blue Robe” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission.