Rain in the hills all night,

Now with the first light of day

All the mountain streams

Converge upon the valley,

And the river pours its flood

Of dark and swirling waters

Beneath the grey and sweeping clouds

Far into Dundalk bay.

"Man came silently into the world."

He was there from the beginning;

Molecular complexity attained the cell,

From cellular coherence the mammalian brain

Derived its power to speculate

And dream in vain.

In tracing evolutionary streams

The mind runs back along their tributaries

To the dark and naked hills where it was born

In the earth's deep womb,

And from such memories we return

Like Lazarus from the tomb.

Where does a stream become a river?

When did an ape become a man?

When it first knew itself

And its predicament,

And asked for the first time

Whence did I come?

And wither go?

When to the age-long prompting of the heart

Mind answered, No.

Mind was always there;

Unaware within the atom,

Sleeping within the cell,

Until one morning

Man came silently into the world,

Into a garden, into the clear light

Of Eden,

To see beside him his companion Eve,

And he was blind no more.

Our future, if we have any future at all,

Depends upon our ability to live with one another,

To act together with the perfect co-ordination

Of cells in bone and blood, in the muscle and gut

Which make a man,

And from a mob create society,

Which is to acquire charity,

Within the body of Christ,

The Universal Church.

Where rivers pass under bridges,

They may pass from one land to another land

And the people who dwell therein

May build different cities,

And in the market place

Worship at different shrines.

Likewise the same river

In different generations

Is loved and known by very different men;

For it was beside a river

That man first knew himself

And first slew his brother.

It was at the moth of this river

That Cuchulain met the daughter

Of the King of Antioch,

Who had come to him from over the sea

In a ship with coloured sails.

Old tales of mythological heroes

Sound strange in our ears,

Yet somewhere behind the myth

There was a real time and an actual place

Where mankind came silently into the world,

And the long river of life

Passed beneath a bridge

Into a different country,

And beneath a grey sky

Turned towards the City,

The unattainable city,

Omega,

The City of God.

January 1961