Poetry at the Post: In Memory of Quiet Days

Advice to a Young Prophet
BY THOMAS JAMES MERTON

Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers
Eat insects. Here private lunatics
Yell and skip in a very dry country.

Downtown Louisville is far from being a “dry country.” Instead, it is wet, very wet indeed especially on the urban bourbon trail. I know from experience. I took my virgin #urbanbourbon trip last Thursday afternoon with a group of fellow writers. My rating: 

I’d would have given it a 5 star but one of the bartenders had an angry air. Fortunately, at every other place, the bartenders were super professional and friendly–especially at our final stop at Dish on Market. 

Or where some haywire monument
Some badfaced daddy of fear
Commands an unintelligent rite.

In a fuzzy haze, I was walking back to the Brown Hotel and ran into this plaque to Thomas Merton. Had I wondered around a bit more I would have discovered another Thomas Merton plaque, the one that celebrates “a mystical experience — one that happened to the monk Thomas Merton on March 18, 1958:

‘In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers….There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.’