Lew Sarett

From “The Box of God”

O EAGLE whose whistling wings have known the lift

Of high mysterious hands, and the wild sweet music

Of big winds among the ultimate stars,

The black-robes put you in a box of God,

Seeking in honest faith and holy zeal

To lay upon your lips new songs, to swell

The chorus of amens and hallelujahs.

O bundle of copper bones tossed in a hole,

Here in the place-of-death—God’s fenced-in ground!—

Beneath these put-in pines and waxen lilies,

They placed you in a crimson gash in the hillside,

Here on a bluff above the Sleepy-eye,

Where the Baptism River, mumbling among the canyons,

Shoulders its flood through crooning waterfalls

In a mist of wafted foam fragile as petals

Of windflowers blowing across the green of April;

Where ghosts of wistful leaves go floating up

In the rustling blaze of autumn, like silver smokes

Slenderly twisting among the thin blue winds;

Here in the great gray arms of Mont du Père,

Where the shy arbutus, the mink, and the Johnny-jump-up

Huddle and whisper of a long, long winter;

Where stars, with soundless feet, come trooping up

To dance to the water-drums of white cascades—

Where stars, like little children, go singing down

The sky to the flute of the wind in the willow-tree—

Somebody—somebody’s there … O pagan Joe …

Can’t you see Him as He moves among the mountains—

Where dusk, dew-lidded, slips among the valleys

Soft as a blue wolf walking in thick wet moss?

Look!… my friend!… at the breast of Mont du Père!…

Sh-sh-sh-sh!… Don’t you hear His talking waters …

Soft in the gloam as broken butterflies

Hovering above a somber pool?… Sh-sh-sh-sh!

Somebody’s there … in the heart of Mont du Père …

Somebody—somebody’s there, sleeping … sleeping …