Sunday, April 25, 2010

The Sowing of Meanings

by Thomas Merton

See the high birds! Is theirs the song
That flies among the wood-light
Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?
Or do they play in wheeling silences
Defining in the perfect sky
The bounds of (here below) our solitude,

Where spring has generated lights of green
To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?
Ponds full of sky and stillness
What heavy summer songs still sleep
Under the tawny rushes at your brim?

More than a season will be born here, nature,
In your world of gravid mirrors!
The quiet air awaits one note,
One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring:
One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then
Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!

For, like a grain of fire
Smouldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power--
Buries His thoughts too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower.

Until, in the amazing light of April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.

Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,
While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,
Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,
The deep united threeness printed in our being,
Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an institution, turns within,
And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,
Dives after, and discovers flame.

2 comments:

  1. I also love Poetry..
    Your Blog is really Nice!!!
    With All best Wishes..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for stopping by Seedlings. Sure, you can post the poem. All I ask is for a link to the original over at my place.

    Glad to meet a fellow poetry lover. :)

    ReplyDelete