BY SEAN EARNER

This New Word is an Old Land indeed.

The wilderness we have only begun to push back against 

Bears the mystery of a disaster.

Innocence we do not find

Nor bring ourselves. 

They, the peoples who lived here, 

We, the peoples who came here,

All alike bear the tragedy of exile in our eyes

In our words 

In our songs.

We are sons and daughters of a good family brought to ruin

With only faded garments, courteous gestures, and certain bravado from our better days

To give evidence for our royal blood.

In our hearts are the lost content of primordial Orders

And memories of when Angels walked with men

And taught sons of Adam the remedies of mortality.

The soil is curst.

But God’s call comes all the same.

And wandering amid the trees

I have heard Him sound amid the wind and thunder

Him who made the Book of Nature 

Him who made the Book of Salvation 

Him who gave me eyes to read them both

In calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world.

“I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the valley.”

Such is He who has cast out the Old Man

With his wavering heart and his tired lusts

And made me light in step 

like a hind upon the solitary mountains

rapt and swallowed up in God.

I am a sheep in my father’s pasture

All around me, all above me, all in me

I find majesty and meekness joined together.

My soul worships with trembling

And it yet adores gladly all the same.

His Sweetness does not sicken

Nor does His Terror annihilate.

In almost every thing, 

I find the calm cast of divine glory

The sober ecstasy of the Father

Who dwelt before the sea we crossed

Or the earth we found.

Such is the true independence, 

Such is the true empire,

His and ours alike.

Absolute sovereignty, 

Beyond Chance,

Beyond Choice,

Beyond Fate, 

I love to ascribe to God.

A teaching of light and comfort 

I now know.

When nothing can resist His Saving Arm

Which cut the waters in two,

Nothing can resist us as we walk onward

With dry feet.

This New World is an Old Land indeed.

But, hope against all hope,

For Abraham’s children,

Edenic freshness can still be found. 

Sanctity and virtue 

May build their outpost here

Where all Being can sit down

And remember.