Lenten Grace-- A Fitting Silence

I owned a slope full of stones.
Like buried pianos they lay in the ground...

As I piled them in the light
I began their music. I heard their old lime
rouse in breath of song that had not left me.
I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.
What bond have I made with the earth,
having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing
I have carried with me out of that day.
The stones have given me music
that figures for me their holes in the earth
and their long lying in them dark.
They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,
and I must prepare a fitting silence.
--Wendell Berry, from "The Stones"

What does it take to move a stone?
When it is an effort to till the untillable,
creating a place where simple seed
can drop, be covered and sprout and thrive,
it takes muscle and sweat and blisters and tears.

What does it take to move a stone?
When it is a day when no one will speak
out of fear,
the silent will be moved to cry out
the truth, heard and known and never forgotten.

What does it take to move a stone?
When it is a day when all had given up,
gone behind locked doors in grief,
and two came to tend the dead,
but there was no dead to tend.

Only a gaping hole left
Only an empty tomb
Only a weeping weary silence
broken by Love
calling our name
and we turn to greet Him
as if hearing it for the first time.

--Emily Pilson Gibson, American poet, physician, and farmer from her blog Barnstorming