Poems of Narad

Know Eternity Again

The poetry of earth is lost,
Compromised the hope of man;
A painful ending, laughter forced
The overriding lesson-plan

Of a species in its dying throes.
All our treasured lofty aims
Lie fallen in dust to decompose.
Forgotten are the saviour names,

The labour and sacrifice of soul
Of martyrs and enlightened seers;
And earth seems mindlessly to roll
Abandoned mid the whirling spheres.

Religions now a sterile breed
Emptied of their inner force
And we who fatten on our greed
Have lost the compass and the course.

Shall man then die, his body hurled
Among the ruins he has wrought,
Is there still time to save the world
Or are there battles still unfought

And brothers needing to be slain
To fill insatiable desire?
Will global warming be our end
Or will we self-destruct in fire?

We know not the future lacking sight
Nor in ourselves what blackness grows
For even those who live for light
The aspiration wanes or goes

Meekly towards the jaws of night
And we are stranded and forlorn.
Where now the sweetness and delight
When from the heart all hope is torn

And at our throats death's jackals bay
All joy of life a dullness seems
And faith is hobbled on legs of clay.
A decadence of darkness gleams,

The Shade is porter at our door
Servant of our untimely fall.
Was there not a voice before
A vague and faint remembered call

In silent moments of the soul,
A melody or lyric cry
That beckoned onward to the goal
Saying we were not meant to die

But find within the fount of love
Eternal in our mortality
And faith by which our spirits move
Towards the godhead's destiny.

Self-finding only through self-loss
Awakening alone by grace,
We cannot afford to slow or pause
For in the steps of God we pace,

We the valiant, we the strong
March towards those stainless feet
To feel the touch for which we long
And find our lives in Him complete.

We belong not to a dying past,
The future is born in us each day,
Each moment is our first and last,
We are the actors in His play

Not supernumeraries here.
Although the throes of birth bring pain
We must cast out all doubt and fear
And know eternity again.