The Evening of the Visitation (Thomas Merton)

  Go, roads, to the four quarters of our quiet distance,  

While you, full moon, wise queen,  

Begin your evening journey to the hills of heaven,  

And travel no less stately in the summer sky 

Than Mary, going to the house of Zachary. 

The woods are silent with the sleep of doves, 

The valleys with the sleep of streams, 

And all our barns are happy with peace of cattle gone to rest. 

Still wakeful, in the fields, the shocks of wheat 

Preach and say prayers: 

You sheaves, make all your evensongs as sweet as ours, 

Whose summer world, all ready for the granary and barn, 

Seems to have seen, this day, 

Into the secret of the Lord’s Nativity. 

Now at the fall of night, you shocks, 

Still bend your heads like kind and humble kings 

The way you did this golden morning when you saw God’s Mother passing, 

While all our windows fill and sweeten 

With the mild vespers of the hay and barley. 

You moon and rising stars, pour on our barns and houses 

Your gentle benedictions. 

Remind us how our Mother, with far subtler and more holy influence, 

Blesses our rooves and eaves, 

Our shutters, lattices and sills, 

Our doors, and floors, and stairs, and rooms, and bedrooms, 

Smiling by night upon her sleeping children: 

O gentle Mary!  Our lovely Mother in heaven! 

--Thomas Merton, The Evening of the Visitation (1947)

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