My life is not this steeply dipping hour
through which you see me hasten down;
I am a tree, I stand against a ground,
only one mouth of many that are mine,
the mouth due to fall silent soon.

I am the pause between a pair of notes
that sound in imperfect resolution:
for death's note drifts up against their fusion--

Yet in the interval of dark the notes, unsure,
trembling, reconcile.
                                  And the song is still pure.

--Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life. Trans. Susan Ranson, 2008.