Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, August 29, 2024.

Today is the memorial of the beheading of St. John the Baptist.

So in honor of that auspicious occasion, I have a poem from Thomas Merton, one of the great 20th century Roman monastics,

authors and poets. The poem is called the quickening of St. John the Baptist, so a kind of

contemplation of his life in the face of this commemoration of his death.

The epigraph of the poem is on the contemplative vocation,

and so it takes John as a jumping off point for Thomas imagining his own monastic vocation,

and perhaps imagining the way in which many of us are called

away from the world as a way to wait for the coming of the Lord and find some necessary,

but not always obvious or intuitive way of serving the world nonetheless.

Here it is the quickening of St. John the Baptist by Thomas Merton.

On the contemplative vocation.

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee, from the sands and the lavender water?

Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth, the yellow fishing boats, the farms,

the wine-smelling yards and low cellars, or the oil press, and the women by the well?

Why do you fly those markets, those suburban gardens, the trumpets of the jealous lilies, leaving them all lovely among the lemon trees? You have trusted no town with the news

behind your eyes. You have drowned Gabriel's word in thoughts like seas and turned toward the

stone mountain to the treeless places.

Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day our lady, full of Christ, entered the dooryard of her relative, did not her steps,

light steps lay on the paving leaves like gold, did not her eyes as gray as doves, a light like the piece

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