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

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THE POET, TO HIS BOOK

Now is the day of our farewell in fear, lean pages:

And shall I leave some blessing on the half of me you have devoured?

Were you, in clean obedience, my Cross,

Sent to exchange my life for Christ’s in labor?

How shall the seeds upon those furrowed papers flower?

Or have I only bled to sow you full of stones and thorns,

Feeding my minutes to my own dead will?

Or will your little shadow fatten in my life’s last hour

And darken for a space my gate to white eternity?

And will I wear you once again, in Purgatory,

Around my mad ribs like a shirt of flame?

Or bear you on my shoulders for a sorry jubilee

My Sinbad’s burden?

Is that the way you’d make me both-ways’ loser,

Paying the prayers and joys you stole of me,

You thirsty traitor, in my Trappist mornings!

Go, stubborn talker,

Find you a station on the loud world’s corners,

And try there, (if your hands be clean) your length of patience:

Use there the rhythms that upset my silences,

And spend your pennyworth of prayer