Spoken

You bade me hold my tongue, but I have spoken,
have wrenched the desert open at the seams
when I should not.  This silence I have broken,
and like the stone it pours out living streams.

I grumbled at the working of your mercy
and envied the contentment of the dead.
I cried out to you living, hungry, thirsty:
You made the waters flow and sent the bread.

And yet, O God, you led me to this desert
as you will lead me through the vale of gloom.
I know that even there I shall be sheltered;
then let me see you make this desert bloom.

Though I break faith as easily as silence,
you never once have broken faith with me,
for never have you sworn this road was trialless,
yet ever here beside me you shall be.

Oh, someday, maybe, I will learn to listen,
to wait for you in trust and not to speak,
yet when the sun and all the dead have risen
we’ll shout your praise from every mountain peak.

The above panorama shows a view of the Atacama Desert as seen from the ESO Paranal Observatory, home to the Very Large Telescope. To the right of the image, one can see the road leading to the summit of Cerro Armazones, a site located in Chile, and a possible home for the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The E-ELT programme office has studied half a dozen potential sites for the future E-ELT observatory, which, with its 40-metre-class diameter, will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Various aspects need to be considered in the site selection process. On the E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee’s final short list for the recommended site, Armazones is also the committee’s preferred site, because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing Paranal Observatory. Atacama, the world’s driest non-polar desert, part of the Arid Diagonal of South America By ESO/S. Brunier - http://www.eso.org/public/images/armazonesparanal/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26458337