Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White and I'm filling in for David Kern today.

And I'm going to read you a poem by Thomas Merton called Elegie for the Monastery Barn. And this is how it goes.

As though an aged person were to wear two gay a dress and walk about the neighborhood announcing the

hour of her death. So now, one summer day's end at supper time when wheels are still,

the long barn suddenly puts on the traitor beauty and hails us with a dangerous cry. For,

look, she calls to the country.

Look how fast I dress myself in fire.

Had we have guessed how long her spacious shadows harbored a woman's vanity,

we would be less surprised to see her now, so loved and so attended and so feared.

She, in whose airless heart we burst our veins to fill her

full of hay, now stands apart. She will not have us near her. Terribly, sweet Christ, how terribly

her beauty burns us now. And yet she has another legacy, more delicate to leave us and more rare. Who knew

her solitude? Who heard the peace downstairs while flames ran whispering among the rafters? Who felt the

silence there, the long, hushed gallery, clean and resigned in waiting for the fire. Look, they have all come back

to speak their summary, 50 invisible cattle. The past years assume their solemn places one by one.

This is the little minute of their destiny. Here is their meaning found. Here is their end. Laved in the

flame as in a sacrament, the brilliant walls are holy in their first, last hour of joy. Fly from within the

barn. Fly from the silence of this creature sanctified by fire. Let no man stay inside to look upon the Lord.

Let no man wait within and see the Holy One sitting in the presence of disaster,

thinking upon this barn, his gentle doom.

Thomas Merton was a 20th century poet, activist, essayist, writer, also a trappist monk.

He was a convert.

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