What words do you use when you have something to say

yet your chosen vocation disallows the use of voice

no auditory resonance allotted to the ones such as yourself

Merton struggled from this platform to give us lines that change lives

believing as he did that the human vocation-not just his or those of some imagined

higher calling-to be

gardeners of paradise.

So me here now in this studio overflowing color and light I look about

the spaces filling with yellows and greens vibrancy across canvas and paper

and there in my chair composing words into sentences is this too

where I stand gardening the paradise of my own small corner of this world now?