Christmas Blessings from Bread New Mexico

When the white stars talk together like sisters

And when the winter hills

Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,

Somewhere one window

Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars,

White stars that stand above the eastern stable.

Look down and offer Him.

The dim adoring light of your belief.

Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child

(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)

Conquer the winter of our hateful century?

-Thomas Merton, excerpts from A Christmas Card (1947)
(see full poem in Thomas Merton's Marian Poetry, University of Dayton)