If there is no meaning to life past these days,
the pleasures we take will stand on their own.
The love we have given, received, will be priceless,
but destined to end with decay of our bones.
Each day a new sunrise tells of new beginnings,
just so may someday the sun be outshone.
Sometime and somewhere we will waken to newness
to find our dreams have been wildly outflown.
We will do so much better and farther and more,
it will leave all the best of our deeds far outdone.
Somehow there may be, as likely as springtime,
a season when all we know will be outknown:
someday to outsee all these eyes ever saw
in this world, outbe all existence we've known.
This is a beautiful poem Hermina, not least because of its gentle defiance of those thoughts that rob the present of their significance, and its equally gentle forward look with hopeful possibility. Questioning is its own act of trust.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite writers is P T Forsyth. He wrote about that final summing up of what our lives might have been but are:
"The end of all is the grace unspeakable, the fulness of glory - all the old splendour fixed, with never one lost good;all the spent toil garnered, all the fragments gathered up, all the lost love found forever, all the lost purity transfigued in holiness, all the promises of the travailing soulnow yea and amen, all sin turned to salvaton."
Someday even the sun will be outshone, and our dreams be wildly outflown. To write like that takes great courage, faith and a greater love. Shalom, Jim.
Wow, thanks, Jim, for your kind comments. And allow me to thank you too for all the writers and poets you have recommended the last few years. After that wonderful quote I look forward to searching out and reading more by P. T. Forsyth.
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