Poetry

LEGAL DEATH

by Walter Boswell
01/28/19
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Legal Death

It has become like blood-letting to live,

                  to think enjoyment a taste or touch,

                                for anything to yield

                    in vein alone – a living sacrifice.

Only He who spreads the infinite, yet declines definite show;

   who hurls the twilight in never-ending limits of sunshine 

                  dare bid one last rule be laid in me …

                on this burned-out flesh heavily pinned,

                   already incensed to the embalming.

Rawly Done

In my half-way days of yesteryear

when I thought to meet the Lord more than half-way,

                in the times when I was fresh like spring to write

                                and eager to do His bidding;

in that glorious season when I could have rolled out wonders

                bespeaking the wanderings performed mightily in thee,

                                then …        being only then

                must have been a stain on the cloth of God to see,

                a vision of refuse on His clean-cut lawn –

                                before warning notice given.

Unlike then,               I am old,

                and am no longer able to stand for spring

                or garner droplets of flowers into my brainstorm,

                or huddle the sheaves of grain into my barnyard

                                                of weathered thoughts;

I feel no God,                   no good in being alive,

                                no near beauty in what I once beheld closely.

There can be no clearness in days leftover,

                                nor any compass point to coming home –

                now that I am an aversion to love,

                now that I cannot keep my hands from shaking,

                                when I am wasted with time;

                                deign would you make me reborn?

I resent the strong bitterness housed alongside,

                                                but it is dejection’s own.

                I have lost the battle against a beaten God.

                                Himself though I needed, like Christ.

When much of what was nearly here        peers most remote,

and the ugliness without looks aghast at the emptiness within,

                                                                                turn away,

                lest this terrible self become the terror of a lost world.

Dr. Walter Boswell

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