Know Eternity Again

The poetry of earth is lost,

Compromised the hope of man;

A painful ending, laughter forced

The overriding lesson-plan

Of a species in its dying throes.

All our treasured lofty aims

Lie fallen in dust to decompose.

Forgotten are the saviour names,

The labour and sacrifice of soul

Of martyrs and enlightened seers;

And earth seems mindlessly to roll

Abandoned mid the whirling spheres.

Religions now a sterile breed

Emptied of their inner force

And we who fatten on our greed

Have lost the compass and the course.

Shall man then die, his body hurled

Among the ruins he has wrought,

Is there still time to save the world

Or are there battles still unfought

And brothers needing to be slain

To fill insatiable desire?

Will global warming be our end

Or will we self-destruct in fire?

We know not the future lacking sight

Nor in ourselves what blackness grows

For even those who live for light

The aspiration wanes or goes

Meekly towards the jaws of night

And we are stranded and forlorn.

Where now the sweetness and delight

When from the heart all hope is torn

And at our throats death's jackals bay

All joy of life a dullness seems

And faith is hobbled on legs of clay.

A decadence of darkness gleams,

The Shade is porter at our door

Servant of our untimely fall.

Was there not a voice before

A vague and faint remembered call

In silent moments of the soul,

A melody or lyric cry

That beckoned onward to the goal

Saying we were not meant to die

But find within the fount of love

Eternal in our mortality

And faith by which our spirits move

Towards the godhead's destiny.

Self-finding only through self-loss

Awakening alone by grace,

We cannot afford to slow or pause

For in the steps of God we pace,

We the valiant, we the strong

March towards those stainless feet

To feel the touch for which we long

And find our lives in Him complete.

We belong not to a dying past,

The future is born in us each day,

Each moment is our first and last,

We are the actors in His play

Not supernumeraries here.

Although the throes of birth bring pain

We must cast out all doubt and fear

And know eternity again.