into great silence

(I wrote this after watching the AMAZING film “Into Great Silence” that was filmed in a monastery in the French Alps. The film itself tries to get you out of the frenetic pace of modern society and into the rhythm of the seasons, prayers, and silence that the monks live out.)

the monk faces say much
without saying anything
the foreignness of words
in these long halls of silence
each man a child
without past or future
lost in the encounter
of an everlasting prayer

snow clings to trees that
will soon drip with joy
dribbling down musky bark
reeking of renewal
and by my laptop window
I ingest this prayer on playback
omniscient in my observance
transcending framed transcendence

the sound of scraping
echoes in rooms of stone
walls soaked with chant
and the essence of life
absorbing entreaties
with a godlike finality
each old man child-face
accepts without question

the strangeness of this spectacle;
their simplicity of singular focus
me, in my distracted estrangement
finding a place in the communal song
even in my out-of-tune exile;
this grainy introspection reverberates wildly

the earthy tones of flourishing symbols
life un-distilled like flowing water;
a man in his cowl makes music by adding
only punctuation with a robe-swishing traipse
lightly he jaunts over heaven-cursed ground
reclaiming Eden by sheer depth of being
while the fragmented soul that sees from afar
longs to be him and in so doing is found.