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A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi. (In front of you, a precipice. Behind you, wolves.)

Thursday, April 29, 2021

National Poetry Month--Day 29--Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day--Free Verse--Joseph

 


Today is Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day. I haven't figured out which one I want to use yet, which is okay, because my jammies have no pocket. But when I get dressed and figure it all out, it'll be there. Today I was reading the index in my scriptures. Normally I'd pass right by it in favor of more meaty scriptures. But today it just wouldn't move past the index on my kindle. So I finally bowed to that. God must want me to read that today. So this poem is about one thing that really struck me:

ABIDE

Who cannot abide a kingdom's laws

Abides not its power because of his flaws

It's all in our choices of word, act, or will

Whether we handle the Lord's bitter pill

If character flaws define every action

The Celestial Kingdom will hold no attraction

We'll comfortably stay where the laws we can live

Are catered to all that our faint hearts can give

But oh we shall wail when we realize our loss

When the glory we can't handle away we do toss

When the doing is done and the test scores are tallied

If we rest on our laurels we'll wish we had rallied

That will be Hell in its agony searing

To know if we'd tried to believe what we're hearing

We could have inherited a place with the Son

Instead of the darkness of walked-but-not-run.

©2021 by H. Linn Murphy

I also was reading about Joseph Smith's account of what happened to him. This time different visions of him caught at my soul. This comes from that experience:


 LITTLE JOSEPH

 

Little Joseph, name of such heritage, 

Poor farm boy

How could you have known as you hoed potatoes

And pulled sticks and stumps

Ranging the fields in the morning sun

Dew gems on the spiderwebs

Your life would utterly change

With one journey to a verdant grove?

Just a boy with questions in his eyes

And a hunger in his heart

Reared in a hurricane of blindness and seeking

With lo here, and lo there  

They whirled you about

Seeking another sheep to swell their folds

And their pockets,

Done with the questions

Stowed behind walls of clay.

Your natural insouciance tempered

By the ache of drawing as if on a rack

Pulled this way and that on a whim

A hollow in the trees beckoned

Mist rising from the cornfields

You made a small pilgrimage,

Questions luring you

From which that boy never returned. 


 Coruscating light, blinding, brilliant

Filled the cavern of your darkness

Banishing the rags and tags and daggers

Of blinding ignorance

Tearing from your eyes the scales of 

Man's littleness of thought

The scales of the serpent

Coiling around victims also searching

Squeezing

Trying to squeeze the 

Inheritance from you.

No!


 

Away! Away!

The light arks out,

Beams sweeping dark to the edges of existence

For Who comes now in your extremity, but 

He who built it All

And His Father, 

King of Everything.

Architect of Eternity

Master of All Souls

Giver of all life and thought

Come in Brilliant Majesty

To start something Magnificent.

Their tool?


A humble farm boy

Just learning long division

Tutored by the Bible and the Spirit

Open with questions.

Choose none of them.

They have been infected by

The tightness of man 

Constricting in their blind greed

Filling their own 

And the Prince of Darkness'

Purpose

Spreading tarry filth

To infect and pull down

Entrapping.

How could you know

The streaming light would come with such

Steep prices?

Every gift of elegant new knowledge

Drops of pure sunlight

And magnificent gleaming love

Met with daggers and threats

Pine tar and feathers

Death and destruction

The darkened faces 

Of those whose minds 

Could not open enough 

To hold the Light

Every step wrung from 

An adversary who knew

Even in death most foul

You would prevail

As you prevailed over all you had been.

A snowball, rolling downhill

What you and 

The Lord and times which formed you wrought.

Set loose, your vision burgeoned

Picked up speed in spite of 

Dark faces and stunted hearts

Those hands which thought

That tearing you to pieces 

Would stop the momentum

Which frightened them.

That conflagration which consumed you

Set your spirit free

And tossed a torch into the kindling

Which would engulf the world

Did you see it, Little Joseph?

 The fire you lit,

The brilliant majesty you kindled

At the hands of Jesus Christ

And His Matchless, God the Father

Your gift, your legacy, burns in me.

©2021 by H. Linn Murphy


 

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