BOOK ENDS

Life is an open book!

Pages numbered by years

Of joy and sadness

Of smiles and tears

Turned by the fates

And the fears and the folly

That would endear us

To what we hear for a time.

 

My mind reads the lines;

My heart seeks the rhyme; and

My soul marks the rhythm by the pauses

On pages of drawn out prose sown among

Fancies and lilts, tilts and titillations

That milk the lifeblood

Of the soul anxiously awaiting the call to prayer.

 

Yes, serious does come!

All the pages are eventually wrapped in chapters,

Given names and titles and references;

Pictures punctuate the dreary landscape

Of words on end;

Lending the harried or the hurried

To try to ferret out a curious bit

Or to tie one to another as kin.

 

Skin wraps the story

As much as the parchment

Upon which the words will sleep

As the coarse binding is closed

On all the sirens and the dreams and the truths

That seemed so well important.

 

But as the pages are turned and

The chapters earn their weight

Every reader secretly yearns for the end,

When and how the story bends;

 

Climaxes come and go;

The denouement holds sway

In anticipation of what may be

Yours or mine or his.

 

I close your book with ease;

I would to please my soul though

By holding my book to a present page;

Longing for the touch

Of both protagonist and objective narrator;

Dying over and over by experiences

That give the good wisdom to write

FINIS!

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FIRE LIGHT

I danced a peculiar dance around the fire

Like I did not know that it burned;

Like the heat of the company around it

Was the heat for which I yearned;

Now I can concentrate on its light and its beauty

Because the feel of its warmth I have learned.

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ACTIVE CHRISM

You want accomplishments do you?

Short and sweet and to the point;

They are waiting in the shadows

For God more than man

My efforts to anoint.

 

Yes, dirty hands will need wait for the Spirit,

When activity and passivity is moot

So the stigma of yesterday’s errors

In the anointing it might refute.

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