Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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The poem reads as follows:

A LETTER TO MY FRIENDS

On entering the Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, 1941

This holy House of God,

Nazareth, where Christ lived as a boy,

These sheds and cloisters,

The very stones and beams are all befriended

By cleaner sun, by rarer birds, by lovelier flowers.

Lost in the tigers’ and the lions’ wilderness,

More than we fear, we love these holy stones,

These thorns, the phoenix’s sweet and spikey tree.

More than we fear, we love the holy desert,

Where separate strangers, hid in their disguises,

Have come to meet, by night, the quiet Christ.

We who have some time wandered in those crowded ruins,

(Farewell, you woebegone, sad towns)

We who have wandered like (the ones I hear) the moaning trains,

(Begone, sad towns!)

We’ll live it over for you here.

Here all your ruins are rebuilt as fast as you destroy yourselves,

In your unlucky wisdom,

Here in the House of God

And on the holy hill,

Where fields are the friends of plenteous heaven,

While starlight feeds, as bright as manna,