Somewhere there is water
the colour of sky.
I know two nights ago my
son and I,
in the kitchen sustaining cuts,
were passing words as little parring knives,
when later I watched him
on the deck looking up,
his proud back poised,
his neck a funnel for the pouring sky.
The world then turning
a dusky pink,
in a sunset swathe laid
in each direction,
that where the sun was sinking
we could not see,
just knew we’d been disarmed,
tapped on the shoulders while ruminating.
And somewhere we each know
there is always water the colour of sky,
always a sun rising
and sinking.
Always a still pool with its surface unbroken,
but for fish and birds.
And we, in our small goldfish bowls
carrying on
as though we had all the reason to.
As though it all mattered
who were right,
when all that matters is that we pay attention,
watch,
contemplate,
see how as caged birds we fight
though the door is wide open.
Our territories large
that they merge as one
between sea and sky.
Somewhere,
here even.
Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
January 2022
“One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no ‘down’ for the world, but only in every direction an ‘up.’”
~ Anne Gilchrist
“If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.”
~ Thomas Merton, from ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’
“Christ brought to His disciples a vocation and a task, to struggle in the world of violence to establish His peace not only in their own hearts but in society itself.”
~ Thomas Merton, in his letter ‘Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility’
“Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream ― the dream of my separateness, of the ‘special’ vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race ― and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too a member of the Human Race!
Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are ― as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth.”
~ Thomas Merton, from ‘Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander’
Living Tree Poetry 