Contemplation of Creation's Culmination

Earth's bare beauty mesmerizes the eye,

before bulging buds break to gild her in green garb...

This place, curtailed by constant tick and tock where winds harass

The trees and shifting seas that shape shorelines of rock and grass

And stirs earth’s ancient dust with lessons old yet new to we

Who shed innocence in the ken of swift mortality

…how we are not long for this place of human-race and sod

Until, without doubt we return to its Creator; God

The earnest heed we ought to give while we live, pleads within

It trembles in The Soul and ravages our skiffs of skin

As we, breath-taken by the sheer undoing of time’s ply

Waken to mercy’s newness and the blueness of its sky

Where purpose wields its calling where the falling shadows climb

The hills that wore ages of yore yet spill in flawless prime

War lords its ugly fear in hearts where love and longing war

We board the vessel of new day that sails from heaven’s door

And oft we stare, astonished as our gaze drinks from the spring

Of nature’s changeless ways where change seems the only sure thing

While we bury our dead and shed tears on the dust that soon

Will claim the very hands and feet that labor for its boon

Hunger besieges us and wonder’s spills in silent speech

Seasons go round and round like waves that wash and wash earth’s beach

Where we are more than pulsing ellipses of fragile breath

Born for far more than every living thing that ends in death

Though flesh may fail and what we see may seem to be life’s whole

Mere eye cannot descry the fathom of the shapeless soul

The fool declares the fool’s belief; jeers in the face of God

And fools of like-foolmindedness cheer blindly and applaud

The grave claims wise and fool alike; no one escapes death’s due

Or what remains after life’s holy hope and grace is through

Where, even as we breathe, someone breaks breathing’s sacred seals

To what we oft imagine but what death alone reveals

 

Progress perplexes pioneers of it with cons and prose

The sun sets pink but what its ink begets nobody knows

Though the pretext of what is next dares to wear cloth of plan

We who have worn and borne it know how Unknown vexes man

For none are privy to the mystery of morrow’s way

But all are always, only, ever subject to Today

Thought’s culmination of creation’s wherefore and its why

Cannot ignore the imminence of Something more than eye

Can encapsulate, though with telescope we try to find

What lies beyond this scope of hope and reaches of the mind

But recognize that eons rise beyond this mortal flit

And realize that Someone Greater orders all of it

 

© Janet Martin