Board of plenty

You have laid the table well
For those who would feast on sorrows.

You have given trials richly
To those You know must grow.

Yet must this be so?
Can only throught the pain,
So very like the pains of death
The gift of wisdsom find its rest?

I am not weak, and bitterness
In me finds little consolation
That it should live or grow
Near to my chest.

Yet even so, I find the
Call to suffer and to suffer well
More cryptic than all the twists of
Gordium. Shall I rest?

I do not think that rest was made for you.
Much wisdom is your stock
And wisdom brings its sweetness and its pain.
Endure and learn.

With time, you shall, I think, find hope
To rise again.

The Arcs of God

These thinned, gossamer threads
Of time, flesh, existence, essence
Are what gifts we have from Hands
Which give, and give, yet never change.

They are lines. Gently they curve.
Space is their element, hope their breath.
They are strung from the stars of heaven.
They drape with the grace of beauty.

These soft arcs, yours and mine,
Are for each other close,
And seem by those same Hands
Meet for some congruence.

And touching once they part, tangential.
Space and time and dreams shall move between.

When alone in drafty halls think not of Richard on his Throne

Historical study is a fearful thing these days. The halls of history, I would argue, have become immensely drafty in the past 100 years. The study has been minimized, quantified, qualified, identified, contained, boxed, and sealed into riduculously small and handy packages, the only trouble being, and curiously this never occured to any of its perpetrators, that these package do not, and cannot serve the slightest possible practical purpose in all the world of humanity.
Not practical, now how can this be? Certainly, gender studies, sociological insights, and race relation research is emminently practical, is it not? Perhaps, and again, perhaps not. The trouble with all this is simply that history has lost all status as an interpretive metanarrative, thus it has devovled simply to a discipline much as electrical enginnering or psychology. History can no longer tell the non-specialist anything useful or prescriptive. It is in many ways a sealed volume.

Reflect now upon the days thou once were given

To thee we are not given. Yet, if so be it, could the squiggle of our narrow lives, or the then annelidous turnings of unremembered hours, joys, fears, and variegated emotions, affections, dusky dreams, could they all birth something truly full of wonder? Could they struggle to conform the disenchanted pieces of forgotten quests with the new born visions of connected passions? These are the questions. To us they are given, ripe, with that small, fruit-borne smile that quaintly, sweetly says, "journey far, suffer much, but find...find in the journey itself joy enough to slake the thirst that only such a journey may inspire." The smile is not in vain. The curve upon the lips is real. The vision flickers low, but questions may beget, and offspring, not in vain, shall, with grace and time, populate my tortuous hearth.

What stones shall witness

Dead men gather too in other Lands. And there, I think, they must, as ours, Consider issues weighty with Significance.

There too when light and noise shall Split, and heaven crash, the pocked earth Shall give. And when that moment comes Who can say what stones shall witness?

Love, be strewn

Fearless grace is no excuse
To fight, to scramble in abuse.

Hope alone is not enough
If with it is all rebuff.

Care, concern, can both go wild,
And devastate the meekest child.

Yet love, I think, is quite immune
So let your life with it be strewn.

And then, when to your fathers gathered
You, with praise, shall be quite slathered.

Hoard not.

When shed abroad,
Grace is sufficient
To challenged
Weakened hearts,
Renew minds
Once recumbent.

Then gather not.
Hoard not.
Only let to flow
That flowing
May renew. For,
Grace is sufficient.