Aubade (Monk's Song)

"I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break

into being at your touch?" (Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of a Monastic Life I,19)

I created this empty song, this quest to know,

This space where I can feel the words.

I have been silent too long, and so by choice.

Now the words awakened like birds

Start from December-encrusted boughs.

Silence is startled, and so by choice.

I crumble into being at the touch of your eyes.

Are you God? Am I? Is this heresy why I do not know

The landscape of heaven or of hell?

The bell begins, and so by choice,

The bell itself is silence held between the layers

Of sounding air. Do not confuse remembrance for regret,

but the wonder of emerging and worship.

We come into being with the sound. We are lost with it.

We are still between the violent air, in this silence, God,

Pressed always to the limit,

There is no is but that which we can approach

in silence.