All praise to thee,
My Lord, for scree,
For deep crevasse
And alpine moss,
For glacial till
And ice-blue rill,
For snowy branch
And avalanche.
O Spirit blessed,
Who shaped the crest
And stacked the line
With fir and pine,
Thanks for the shale,
The quartz, the hail
On peaks windblown
With freezing foehn.
Our joy, our hope,
Who smoothed the slope,
Whose mighty work
Includes the cirque,
Turquoise moraine,
And sleeting rain
On precipice:
Thou art our bliss.
To him whose hand
Strewed silt and sand,
Who scattered schist
Through mountain mist
With silver chert,
Black ash, brown dirt,
And scoria:
Sing gloria!
O living God,
Receive our laud
For graupel, ice,
Loess and gneiss,
For anthracite
And dolomite,
For each unique
And craggy peak.
Thee we adore
For copper ore,
For dark ravines
And evergreens.
We bless thy rock,
Thy tarn and loch,
And permafrost
This Pentecost.
(Words by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Photos by Andrew L. Wilson, to whom this is dedicated, because he loves mountains best of all and taught me the word “talus”—“a sloping mass of rocky fragments at the base of a cliff”—which inspired this riff on the famous Tallis’ Canon. The meter and rhyme scheme are based on the original canon, which means you can sing this in a round—as Andrew and I do in the recording here. Finally, it is my devout wish that this poem proves to be the first time in the history of the English language that “Pentecost” has been rhymed with “permafrost,” and “scoria” with “gloria.”)
