Locked in that strength
we stay and stay
and cannot go away
For
you have given us our liberty.
Father Thomas Merton, "Freedom as Experience"
You, too, believed it lucky to die, didn’t you?
Sure enough in your zen-like cell, the earth,
as secure in your shrinking as a barn on fire,
snug as a hairshirt on sackcloth Saturday,
believing in the liberty of dead man’s row,
the sleep of monks at the bridegroom’s call.
Tell me, Brother Thomas, did the city do what the
farm could not?
Was it liberation or desperation,
please don’t simply call it vocation,
that drove you to order,
divinely happy in the presence of so much
disaster?
So content with what others simply cannot.
When you attempted to illuminate words with
fire,
(or was it shadow the light with bird &
wind)
did you have us in mind or was it simply
meditation
gone down the mercantile way? In any case,
I found myself once as if in the flames & your
little book
cooled the fire, the singe marks have since disappeared.
One last thought before going separate ways,
like the farmer & his luck, remembering to
lose
is nearly always worth it for the empty gain:
Did what you gave up ever knock on the
midnight door?
Come haunting the slightest sleep, a lovely woman’s
face?
A lone lily too early for Easter, yet too late
for the sweetest snow?
These questions are worse than empty prayers,
aren’t they
Father Thomas? Or is that exactly what they
are?
The knock-knocking on a vacant door, or worse,
a letter sent without the requisite wait, or
worse than that,
without the familiarity of shared self-regret.
Forgive me, Father, it’s just that I’m not
ready to give up yet.
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