Where Can Your Hiding Be?
Dark Night of the Soul II
Part One
BRIDE
Where is your hiding place?
Beloved, you’ve left me to moan
While like a stag you flee
Leaving the wound with me?
I followed, calling loud, but you’d gone
O shepherds, you that, yonder
Go through the sheepfolds of the slope on high,
If you, as there you wander,
Should chance my love to spy,
Then tell him that I suffer, grieve, and die.
To fetch my loves more near,
Amongst these mountains and ravines I’ll stray,
Nor pluck flowers, nor for fear
Of prowling beasts delay,
But pass through forts and frontiers on my way.
QUESTION TO ALL CREATURES
O thickets, densely-trammelled,
Which my love’s hand has sown along the height:
O field of green, enameled
With blossoms, tell me right
If he has passed across you in his flight.
REPLY OF THE CREATURES
Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face,
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.
St. John of the Cross
