name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be 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?”

by Thomas Merton

There’s something about this poem, by American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), that helps me to feel a sense of stillness and silence that is fathoms deep. There is groundedness (the stones seem to take me there) and there is also mystery (the stones speaking, the Unknown). But then, all of a sudden, in the last stanza, there is a raging fire. What a contrast! I’d like to attempt to reveal to you, and to myself in the writing, what this means to me.

To begin with, I’m fascinated by the phrases in brackets, which seem to be speaking with another voice, maybe from within the poet. Is it the cynical, unbelieving, reticent part of him? Or maybe he’s taking account of the reticent response that could come from the reader. One of my responses to the poem was indeed something like: “Stones speaking? World on fire? I don’t get it. This is all too ‘poetic’ for me! Stones don’t speak!”

Merton’s answer to someone in this position is an encouragement to trust yourself to be able to leave the literal meaning of the words behind and to listen beyond the words – in short to be mindful. To ‘let the words become transparent to the depths that lie beyond’, as priest Simon Small beautifully puts it when speaking about the art of contemplation. When I listen to the poem like this, this is what happens: I’m taken into silence and stillness with a solid, ancient feel. But there’s a voice that keeps questioning. Then I’m on the edge of the unknown and need to release the voice and dare ‘to be my own silence’. I do so, and a sense of the wild wonder of existence roars in and is within and all around me. I give myself to the feel of this awesomeness.

For a long time, I’ve not really understood the last stanza and have even missed it out when sharing the poem because I was attached to the stillness and didn’t want the fire! But I think I’m getting there with it now after pondering, observing my response to it and allowing the words to become transparent to the depths beyond. Perhaps when you’re still enough, you can, on occasion, feel the incredibly intense wonder of existence as if it were like a fire – the creative and destructive force of life. This reminds me of T.S. Elliot’s famous lines ‘And so the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing’.

This poem is a journey. As many poems are. This is where it took me. I wonder where it might take you?

Ps. If you feel attracted towards receiving the wisdom of the world’s poets both ancient and contemporary and you’d like to experiment with how mindfulness can enable a deeper experience of it, come along to the next Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry 6 week course starting in late May, or to a day long retreat in July (both online). Both are open to all.

Photo by David Bayliss on Unsplash