Through all these days
of coming and going,

In all these ways
of thinking and knowing,

For all these years
of planting and sowing:

We long to gather
all that is scattered,

We ache to hold
what really mattered,

We pray for healing
of what has been battered.

There is in us
some deep sense
that things once were better
long ago in a place
of calm peace,

Some place where the power of choice
moved us to claim our own voice,
our own ways of doing
and found we could not stay
in that Eden

but believed that Free Will
was worth the tilling of thorns and thistles.

And so we walk now in the midst
of rose and ashes,
somehow hovering between
paradise and purgatory,
something like angels
yet formed from dust,

Knowing that there are things
that will not rust.
Believing in spite of our birth
that we will one day walk
a New Earth

And that all of anguish,
of fear and fright,
of dread and night,
of pain and death
and faltering breath

Will be banished from that Land
That Knows No Night.

H. Arnett
9/23/16