The garden where you bid us first
to multiply, our acts have cursed.
It now is lost to all our charts.
Will you replant it in our hearts?

The man and woman made of clay,
before your bidding could obey
broke faith, O Lord, broke right and good
and went to till a barren world.

No garden grows but by your might,
but by your gifts of rain and light;
relentless, though, we plow and sow
and bid the seed by our work grow.

By sweat of brow and stoop of back
we seek to burgeon where we lack,
but not a seed we plant bears fruit
excepting Christ himself is root.

The harvest gifts of fruit and grain
come after storm and after pain
or don't, and we are barren left,
lamenting all that we're bereft.

'Twas in a garden, sweating blood,
that Christ accepted for our good
the bitter passion of his end,
and planted something new to tend.

Naught but his touch could break the soil—
not all our groaning, all our toil—
none but his pow'r could plant the seed
where all the birds now rest and feed.

O, gard'ner of that Easter morn,
let what you plant in us be born,
a gift as pure as rain-washed earth:
your life, your will, and our rebirth.