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
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.
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