as these stones are quiet

Credit: Adrian Mann/All About Space

Be still

Listen to the stones of the wall.

Be silent, they try

To speak your

Name.

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you? Whose

Silence are you?

Who (the quiet)

Are you (as these stones

Are quiet). Do not

Think of what you are

Still less of

What you may one day be.

Rather

Be what you are (but who?) be

The unthinkable one

You do not know.

O be still. while

You are still alive,

And all things live around you

Speaking (I do not hear)

To your own being.

Speaking by the Unknown

That is in you and in themselves.

"I will try, like them

To be my own silence:

And this is difficult. The whole

World is secretly on fire. The stones

Burn, even the stones

They burn me. How can a man be still or

Listen to all things burning? How can he dare

To sit with them when

All their silence

Is on fire?"

- Thomas Merton, "In Silence", Collected Poems pp. 280-281