Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

O land alive with miracles!O clad in streams. Lift your blue trees into the early sun!
O country wild with talentIs there an hour in you that does not rouse our mind with songs?The boughs that bend in the weak windOpen us momentary windows, here and there,Into those deep and purple galleries,Disclosing us the birds your genius.
 
O brilliant wood! Yours is the voice of a new world;And all the hills burn with such blinding art
That Christ and angels walk among us, everywhere.These are their ways, their fiery footsteps,That flash and vanish, smile and pass;--By those bright passengers our groves are all inspired.Lo, we have seen you, we have seized you, wonder,Caught you, half held you in the larch and lighted birch:But in that capture you have sailed us half-mile-high into the air
 
To taste the silences of the inimitable hawk:But in the dazzled, high and unelectric airSeized in the talons of the terrible DoveThe huge, unwounding Spirit,We suddenly escape the drag of earthFly from the dizzy paw of gravityAnd swimming in the wind that lies beyond the trackOf thought and genius and of desire,
 
Trample the white, appalling stratosphere.~

Thomas Merton