I STEPPED INTO CREATION

I stepped into Creation
For it had been some time, and too long
In a clammy cell that traps imagination.
For I have longed to be with the harvest grass
Where the rusty red still stands in the wood;
The field where I sit is the green-crested hill,
And though it be green it is good.
The first warm in a while has sent me to this hill,
To capture and to fill, subdue the song and still
My beating heart’s desire.
For it was sung when as a boy I marched upon this ground,
A wild, quiet throng of friends gathered to the sound.
Drinking beauty, drunk with life and boyish strife,
Which builds you up like a tall tree in the Forest of Men.
It was here that I found comfort
In the cold and the war,
And the glorious stand;
When icicles hung upon my hair
And clung to my wear,
And pain was my store
And more: For joy was there
And Care crept away on little feet,
Swept away by honor grand.

MORTALITY

Ah, Mortality, amidst the leaves
That, strewn about by the wet
And the weather, lay damp
In the wood; in the darker day
I dare to stay and grieve.
The shadow cast, a haunting cloud,
A shroud for what’s been taken.
The wetness and the humus
Of the wood seem a stroke, and yet
There is something to be had
And taken from this place.
It lies not in time nor space,
But somehow in a mossy stone,
Deep, deep within, etched at the base
And buried beneath an earthy tone,
A day, a name, and now a Face,
Eternal life from rock and bone.

AROUND THE BEND

Whenever I step out
And leave my porch behind me,
Who’s to say if I’ll return
Or if the tracks I lay will learn
And journey will rewind me?

Only one step more
For the traveler’s journey to end.
I forever feel the burn of home
And someday it will stop my roam,
But, just around the bend.