Addition to Chapter 29

2000-8-24 18:48:00

I can think of no better ending to this chapter than my first attempt at poetry when I was but a lad of 16, but what is the saying? "Out of the mouth of babes."

JOURNEY THROUGH LIFE
By J J Dewey

As I journey through life,
Having experienced good and evil, joy and sorrow;
Having felt hunger and pain, love and hate;
Have many questions to ask fate.
I wonder what it has in store for you and me;
I wonder about the future - what it will be?
What about our children, and their children - will they be free?
Free from sorrow, hunger, misery and pain?
Free from the mistakes, from you and from me?
Free from the blunders of the world, which we have made?
Free from the threatening powers of earth, from the insane?
Their future is tomorrow, and tomorrow is they;
Let them correct the condition of this world, which we have made.
But I ask of tomorrow if they will be.
Be here then - alive, well and free?
Free from all manner of earthly dread,
That they may cling to life, not join the dead.

I view the gardens of earth, the flowers, the leaves;
The earth in raiment, of orchards, of trees.
I then ask of tomorrow if they shall still be;
Be ever green and healthy, as they sway in the breeze;
Or blackened by the breath of insanity,
Withered by the cruelness of humanity;
Or shall they in their beauty remain,
Only to vanish as wood in a flame,
To change to ugliness, to lose their beauty,
To suffer the blunders of man;
To suffer the forces of nature trusted to him,
Which he releases, but never again!
Nature pays for housing you and me,
Pays with wars and blood and ruin.
And while she pays, the enemy goes free,
Free of vengeance, of wrath, which is unseen.

As I journey farther, my mind becomes clear;
Fate reveals the thoughts of man, the future, the fear;
Man's enemy is here, near, very near...
Alas, he has but himself to fear, to blame for the tears;
Tears of man, of nature, of heaven and earth, and the fire of hell,
The fire which drowns his being, his soul, himself;
He clings to others, his children, their children,
To pull them down that he may not suffer alone;
This is the nature of man, which is one,
Which is our future, our children's future.

"If the brain were so simple we couldn't understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't." Lyall Watson