I WENT TO YOUR GRAVES

I WENT TO YOUR GRAVES

I went to your graves to speak with you dead
You answered with nary a sound, but
The echoes of stone, and the blood and the bones
Still in the air they redound
Someone must live, and someone must die
I’ve seen my share of those things, yet
You know them all well in your marrow and flesh
For the shroud is the shield that still clings
To the toil that you wore, to the deeds that you bore
To the future and past you present
When I see countrymen free, and the grass
Green overseas that otherwise death would have spent
If you could arise, recall how you died
Who then could discharge the debt?
That we owe in our souls, but don’t really know
In the war and the wound that beset
About you in harm, the wrong, the alarm
As you struggled the catch your last breath
Yet it fled far away, like your soul on that day
By demand, or command, or request,
What can I say, much less best relay
Of what your great efforts have earned?
You’ve written in blood, in anguish, in mud
We’ll honor, and then we’ll adjourn, oh
The tombs that we’ll build, of marble and steel
Carved with your names and your stars
Will pass with the times as the ages unwind
As you fade into memories afar, yet
The world that you built, the anger, the guilt
Of your blood on the altar of Mars
These will live on, and not just in song, but
In the hope and the home of my heart…

in memoriam, 2016

THE WOUND THAT HEALS

THE WOUND THAT HEALS

The Wound that heals to help secure
Our Lives Eternal to endure
Was writ in Blood and sweat and toil
Then buried in the fruitful soil
That God had plowed in hearts of men
The day he died to live again

His Tomb a Rock, a mountain-top
A different world from which to spot
A brilliant Kingdom, richly cast
Full of souls and fit to last
Beyond the dark of night and death
Into the morn of what is blest
About the God who would be Man, and
Men made new by God’s Great Plan
To heal them true and make them fast
With his own Wounds, so deep, so vast;

A nail, a scourge, a crown of thorns
A cross, a spear, and sin engorged
Upon the Wound that heals us all
Upon the Man who stands and calls
To us upon this Easter Morn,

“Come my Friends, and Be Reborn!

For my Wounds were made for Thee
I give them all, I give them free
And if you’ll touch them to your Heart
Then you and God shall n’er depart –

For the constant Blood my Wounds ensue
Shall Live in God, and God in you…”

 

________________________________________________

 

I had been thinking lately about the Myth of the Wound that can only be healed by the Weapon that made the wound. These thoughts made me realize, just a few days ago, that Jesus had rewritten that Myth, that the Wounds of Christ, the wounds Christs suffered via the acts of men are the only ones that can truly heal man of what most wounds him.

In other words the Wounds of Christ  inflicted by man are the very Wounds that Heal man, and remake him into the Kind of Man he was always meant to truly be.

I guess that had lain on me for the past few days for this morning I woke with this poem running through my head. So I sketched it out on the notepad beside my bed and then came downstairs and wrote it out in full on my office computer and now I post it here.

So this is my poem for this Easter and in Honor of the Wound that Heals.