Don’t let the sadness of silent friends
become the muse of panicked pain.
Let, instead, a song of silent sadness
bedeck the mystery of patient place.
Don’t wait to hear the morning birds –
listen instead to the quiet humming
of trees whose secrets are theirs to share
with those, waiting, craning their necks.
Give what time is left in the weeks of minutes
in days of nowhere to wait –
wait
for what yet will come
in songs, freshly sung,
by voices, newly found.
God has not left you –
she only sings to others still waiting for
notes and what assurance is given
in the pin-pricks of light invading your dark.
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Dear brother Rob — Your poetry, like your prose, never ceases to escort a seeker into the depths of the human soul. May the Lord return your gift as a gift of another form — Hagia Sophia — in the way Merton understood it… Hagia Sophia is a Gift, God’s Life shared with the creatures; it is self-sharing Love, which transform and unify all:
Sophia is Gift, is Spirit, Donum Dei. She is God-given and God Himself as Gift. God is all and God reduced to Nothing: inexhaustible nothingness. Exinanivit semetipsum.
Merton, T. (1977). Hagia Sophia, in: The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York , p. 368
Thanks, bro! Merton was a wonderful poet and one of my all time favorite writers. I just like seeing my name in the same paragraph as his (regardless of the rather erroneous comparison)!