PRAYING PLACES

Antique bed.^[1]

Beside a bed he gladly said,

His prayers years ago,

Or knelt

In prayer very near there

At a chest three feet long or so.[2]

 

A dark room.^[3]

In a room his soul to groom,

He went alone in student years.

Dim den,

That praying place to seek God’s face,

With voice and silent tears.

 

A new floor.^[4]

A concrete floor and nothing more

He paced and prayed and praised.

Moonlight,

Satellites, revealed answers sealed;

His prayers with arms upraised.

 

Southern woods.^[5]

Piney woods testified the goods

His inmost man possessed.

In path,

Calmly praying, trees heard him saying,

“Thank You” for meeting needs confessed.

 

Old school ground.^[6]

Abandoned ground his heart next found;

And paths that lay beyond.

Night, Day,

In mattered not, quiet he sought,

Memories of triumphs were fond.

 

Solitude.^[7]

White solitude, cool latitude,

It really doesn’t matter…at all.

Answers,

Pleas, a song (off far from the throng)

To problems gigantic and tall.

– eab, 7/77

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^[1] Bed at home near Rushville, Ohio as a child.

[2] This would be the cedar chest Dad built when he was 17.

^[3] The dingy old Men’s Prayer Room at God’s Bible School.

^[4] The (then) new tabernacle (now CEC) at Hobe Sound.

^[5] The piney woods behind our house on James Street.

^[6] The land west of the old Public School in Paris, Ohio.

^[7] The back lot (and park near the house) in Akron.

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The Glory of Light

^[1]

You know my heart, O Lord You always know,

The source from which all thoughts and wishes flow.

You know my life, naught from Thee would I withhold,

O let me come, O let me Lord be bold.

 

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^[1] Written with a heavy heart in the pines west of and below the old public school grounds, Paris, Ohio.

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Beauty

Fox grass bending under gentle, windy strokes,

Snow bank patches left on eastern side of slopes,

Early grass growing on the valley wall beyond,

Horizontal streaks set ablaze by the sun,

Unleaved apple trees file up the hill abreast.

A honey bee in strip’d array is out searching for the rest

A variegated heaven is peeking past the tail’s of mares,

As silhouetted birds claimed the world as theirs.     – eab, ’71 APR

Penned in Paris, Ohio

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Spring

Here and there on branches bare,

A cocoon earthward swings,

Waiting, a month or two, to be a zoo,

Of six-legged flying things.

 

Earth is so pleased to end the freeze,

It’s bursting up with joy.

And down the street, with peddling feet,

Rides a six-year boy. ^[1]     -eab,  4/1971

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^[1] Andrew in the first grade, riding his new red bike bought by Granddaddy and Grandmother Scarbrough. Written in Paris, OH.

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Leaves Leave

I heard a little rustling,

A noisy sort of bustling,

On a cold November morning,

Outside my window light.

 

Then I looked into the street;

The leaves were on their feet,

Marching, marching onward; no retreat;

The wind had called the fight.

 

They’d been called on that day,

With others brown and gray,

And the mother tree that nourished them

Now couldn’t bid them nay,

As they scurried and hurried with their might. -eab, 11/1970

 

After living three falls without seeing or hearing falling leaves (Hobe Sound, Florida) was interested in the sound of wind pushed leaves on an old brick sidewalk in Paris, Ohio.  House our apartment was in, was an old stagecoach stop built when Abraham Lincoln was only 15.  

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Sand

Sand.

Salt sand.

Surf-sounded, soft, solid sand.

Sun splashed, sodium-seasoned sand.

Shifting, sifting, smooth, stable shore-sand

Swirling, stinging, swift-stabbing, shining, shaping, swinging, swimming sand.

Most nearly everlasting universal fragment of earth.

Sea-scouring, several sided,

Sweat-scented,

Sand.

-eab, 7/1971  

Written while living in Paris,Ohio 

 

 

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