"there'll always be the love of God"

"there'll always be the love of God"

for Mom

~L. Page

fragile and wheelchair bound/this man who once carried his daughter/over his shoulders walking home through flood waters/now ravaged by aging, run aground/himself falling victim to the slaughter/of sin’s wages which claim every one of its authors/

he coughs, and some substance/from his lungs accumulated, he is now/by his shaking hand too weak to remove from his mouth/this once hunter and fisherman/unable to venture outside and enjoy/the changing of these autumn leaves in the winter of his life/

his worldly possessions have been/whittled down to only a few pictures hung/of his wife, and each child, a daughter and son/standing with their spouses when/their own children’s pictures are in boxes hidden/and the one he most recalls is his own mother, eighty years gone/

once robust and strong, his body/has failed, from health to a daily decline,/and on nurses and a staff of strangers he is dependent/his ears and eyes and memory cloudy/though he’ll still tell the story of the time/he’d earned five dollars cutting the hair of a fellow serviceman/

made him find the barracks bag/down below on their ship amongst a host/and the fellow had proved to be more stubborn than most./but today he didn't remember that/he'd received, himself, a fresh trim, his boast/reduced to being grateful for the tissue in the breast/

pocket of his plaid patterned shirt,/too weak to continue to faithfully attend/the Friday night hymnsing, nevertheless he can oft be found/humming a few lines to an old church/song, the words recalling his Savior's hands/and brow, and the blood spilled for his soul, now more grand/

his railroading days so long past/and coffee and gab with his good ol' boys/with every fading day more lost are the stories/of his service for country, and at last/then coming home to the wife of his youth, the joy/of his life, who by many years went on before him to Glory/

his memory shaken and dislodged/more severely than the tremors that plague his hands/unable to lift himself out of bed or a chair to stand/trying to identify the time on his watch/which is forever twisted around, the wristband/too loose to fit snugly around his wasting frame/

where others aging might succumb/to a darkening countenance or a spirit/that is forever complaining and filled with fear,/lives defined, in passing, by one/grand collection of amassed frontier/prizes and possessions accumulated over the years/

to reach this point where all gain/has been lost and the body is preparing/to meet its Maker as naked as the day it came/this old railroader, dad, husband,/as his body is bit by bit stripped, being/returned to dust in invisible ways of death's claim/

it is as though he is already/passing through his Lord's purifying fire/as the wood, hay, and stubble of his feeble body expire/and the gold of a refined beauty/of a soul once subject to sin's dire/destruction, reborn in Christ and taking on His character/

so the last refrain he'll be singing/is that of the love of God which will never/fade or end, nor from which can his soul be severed/his last years bathed in mercy/this dear man of whom it will be remembered/becoming, in dying, more like his Lord to whom he'll soon fly heavenward.

(c) 2008 Leah Randelle