The Conversation

This week our Department of Pediatrics marked a transition in leadership, one of many rituals and traditions that our hospital family has been able to continue and honor during the pandemic. Wendell Berry has just the right words for honoring a lifetime of education, experience, and wisdom, as well as the hands that receive the baton.

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The Conversation*

By Wendell Berry 

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

Two minds

in succession, grandfather

and grandson, they sit and talk

on the enclosed porch,

looking out at the town, which

takes its origin in their talk

and is carried forward.

*"The Conversation" is an excerpt from the poem "The Handing Down," which is the second of three long poems in Berry's 1969 collection "Findings." "The Handing Down" is about the value of human relationships over time, and about words and ideas that link generations together.