09.12.08 - O Earth, when will we hear you sing?

O Earth! O Earth! When will we hear you sing,
Arising from our grassy hills?
And say: "The dark is gone, and Day
Laughs like a bridegroom in His tent, the lovely sun!
His tent the sun! His tent the smiling sky!"

How long we wait, with minds as dim as ponds,
While stars swim slowly homeward in the waters
of our west?
O Earth! When will we hear you sing?

How long we listened to your silence in our vineyards,
And heard no bird stir in the rising barley.
The stars go home behind the shaggy trees;
Our minds are grey as rivers.

O Earth, when will you wake in the green wheat,
And all our oaks and Trappist cedars sing:
"Bright land! Lift up your leafy gates!
You Abbey steeple, sing with bells,
For look, our Sun rejoices like a dancer
On the rim of our hills!"

In the blue west, the moon is uttered like the word,
"Farewell."

-Thomas Merton,
quoted in When The Trees Say Nothing, p.76