Selected Poems of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811230711
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2020-04-20T20:54:50+00:00

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY BAPTISM

Certain waters are as blue as metal

Or as salt as sorrow.

Others wince like brass in the hammering sun,

Or stammer all over with tremors of shadow

That die as fast as the light winds

Whose flights surprise the promontories

And the marble bay.

Some are crowded everywhere, off-shore, with purple coral

Between the fleets of light that founder in the sand.

Others are full of yawls, or loud with launches,

Or sadder than the bitter smoke

Of tug and trawler, tramp and collier,

Or as grey as battle.

Oh! Since I was a baby in the Pyrenees,

When old St. Martin marked me for the cloister from high Canigou,

How many deeps, how many wicked seas

Went to befriend me with a flash of white-caps

Louder than laughter in the wind and sun,

Or sluggered all our brown bows gunwale-under

In their rowdy thunder—

Only to return me to the land.

Do you suppose that if the green Atlantic

Had ever cracked our brittle shell

And rifled all the cabins for their fruit of drunken passengers,

Do you suppose my sins,

Once we were sorted and disposed forever

Along the shelves of that profound, unvisited museum,

Would there have been immune,

Or learned to keep their coats of unreality

From the deep sea’s most patient candying?

The day You made the waters,

And dragged them down from the dividing islands

And made them spring with fish,

You planned to bless the brine out of the seas

That were to be my death.

And this is the ninth November since my world’s end and my Genesis,

When, with the sting of salt in my dry mouth,

Cross-crowned with water by the priest,

Stunned at the execution of my old companion, death,

And with the murder of my savage history,

You drowned me in the shallow font.

My eyes, swimming in unexpected infancy,

Were far too frail for such a favor:

They still close-kept the stone shell of their empty sepulchre:

But, though they saw none, guessed the new-come Trinity

That charged my sinews with His secret life.

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