The Sowing of Meanings
See the high birds! Is their's the song
That dies 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
stillnesses
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 thought 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 intuition, turns
within,
And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and
oblivion,
Dives after, and discovers flame.
-Thomas Merton
