Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LIFE'S MYSTERY, by SHELDON DARLING


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LIFE'S MYSTERY, by                    
First Line: On yonder hillside grows a single flower
Last Line: But coins the good to emphasize the loss.
Subject(s): Life


On yonder hillside grows a single flower
And in the darkness blooms at midnight hour.
If to unfold its secret I were fit,
I'd find the universe inside of it,

A human soul in ignorance and pain
Forth came, toiled, sweated, grieved and went again.
Could I its Hither and its Thither see,
Life would no more a riddle be to me.

And wandering here, could I but apprehend
The potent agencies that it attend,
That out of Chaos thought it into life
That hovers o'er it through this jaggéd strife,

I'd know that unto mystery beyond
With care parental and affection fond
He'll lead till Death at last to Life awakes.—
This Father-God no mortal e'er forsakes.

Mayhap some verbal quibbler turns the line
To say man may forsake this love divine.
'Twere better far to have no God at all—
Than one weighed down by "finites" in a fall.

He, who in fire and devil must believe
In order to a just-like God conceive,—
In thought and practice equally unwell,
Has heaven possible, a certain hell.

Is this not logic in large letters writ
Or pregnant with a syllogistic wit?
But certes there's a language of the soul
That substantive and verb can ne'er control.

Imagination soars beyond the ken
Of any mathematic there or then;
And Faith—her realm—there reigns a law sublime
Nor chiseled nor curtailed with tools of time.

Her wings outgo, swing upward and o'erlook
A creed, a dogma, rite, or written book.
All are but transient servants of her own
That come and go, and later leave alone.

And if the heart of the Divine grieved not
For human wailings in the endless lot
Of those to everlasting pain consigned,
Remorse, despair, and agony of mind,—

But sitting on His throne ineffable
Cannot the inharmonious e'er annul—
This picture of a super-anthropos
But coins the good to emphasize the loss.





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