FOUR WALLS

As a young man
Thomas Merton climbed
Dante’s seven stories
Of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony
Greed, Anger, Heresy and Violence.

His Birthright of Divine Consciousness
Obscured by Coarse appetites
Ambition
Self-Obsession
And his Will to Power

Called to Christianity
After Cambridge and Columbia
He Awakened to a Vocation
Framed by the Renunciation
Of a Bellicose and Vapid Civilization.

He sought
A Cloistered Life:
To Banish
The Superfluous
In Search of Radiance.

This was not an act
Of supreme selfishness
But a selfless melding
Of his Individual Consciousness
Within the Divine.

Sustained by a Cistercian
Community
Immured for the rest of his days
In ‘The Four Walls of his Freedom’
He wrote, and prayed.

His Life Committed
To the Substantiation
Of the Supreme Truth:
Consumed in Love
We Abide Forever in Radiance.