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Title: The Most-Sacred Mountain
Author: Eunice Tietjens [
More Titles by Tietjens]
Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.
Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace,
a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
is the end that has no end.
Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
says: On this spot once Confucius stood and
felt the smallness of the world below.
The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.
But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
white peace, this stinging exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
rhythm of the daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.
Tai Shan
[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: Most-Sacred Mountain
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