It has been said. . . . So I offer these.

It has been said that in times of stress, like these days just before a heated election and during economic upheaval, that poetry sooths the soul, giving us truth and beauty and music.  So I offer these.

**

When Summer Ends

There is little traffic on this dead end road.
A river flows under a girder bridge.
The mountainside, once on fire with color,
is past its glorious prime.

Leaf-tornados stir up the evening,
brown and dying like Adam and Eve.
Fallen leaves are twirling and dancing.
Twirling and dancing:

A part of the essence of the fall.
The wind picks up and blows like a whistle.
One part of the sky remains angel-wing blue.
The mountainside is past its prime,

a hint of mist cools the country air.
But who would notice?
The river under a girder bridge,
where two trains pass on the parallel tracks?

One train is full of coal.  The other is
longer and completely empty.
I wave at the westbound engineer.
The blue in the sky grows darker and darker.

first published in Right Hand Pointing

**

Reverie In the Woods

I’m trudging along the blue ridge—
scanning for beauty, note pad ready.
The path in the woods is shaded ’til noon.
Dew stays on the grass beside the marked trail.

The path up the mountain looks over into valley,
where droplets of water dance on the jagged rocks.

When I die, I will not leave behind
books, piled high enough, but rather,
like Keats, my brain will be under-gleaned.
So many words.   So little light.

I refuse to think this pain away.  “No, no!” I cry,
at the over-look, where the houses below look like
toys. “The hush will come soon enough.
There are hints already in the green water.”
I am scuffing my boots as I climb.

So many words.  With so little light—
but the God judges love offerings, even now,

before a breathless body’s burned, charcoal ashes
thrown to the wind, return to the forest with its
small gray squirrel and in the spring mating robins,
past the calling loons, and then still, still, on.

fist published in Southern Hum

**

In Retrospect

Remember how the wind
held yellow leaves in airy fingers?

The last leaf,
in high branches, clung to the tree.

We walked through full sun,
deepening shadows,

wondering how we kept our footings
while acorns snapped

beneath our feet.  Remember
the contumacious violets in brown

grass?  Pretending the rain was
early snow, we chose the long way home

and sang off-key.

first published in Domicile

**

Wisdom from Thomas Merton

We realize very keenly in America today [October, 1968] that the monk is essentially outside all establishments. He [or she] does not belong to an establishment. He [or she] is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience.

Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal [person] accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, and the office of the monk or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.

Thomas Merton. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart and James Laughlin, editors. New York: New Directions Press, 1969: 305-306.