Three Prayers

In honor of this poetry month of April, I'd originally planned to offer my opening and closing poems from one of my novels. Today, after witnessing the recurrent rath of our natural planet, I'm moved to offer three prayers. Also, I'm reminded once again that we're all stowaways on a rogue spaceship, helpless to plot a course much less determine our personal or collective destinies.
My first prayer is one of thanks for those souls who met their own destiny in the horrendous storms that have swept across the land. No matter how short their span was in human terms, one and all had a life and made an impact on those who knew and loved them.
My second prayer is for the survivors who've been left behind to pick up the pieces of their lives and strive for something approaching normalcy once the shock of loss has diminished somewhat.
My third prayer is for the rest of us to do whatever we can to reach out to those victims. Some of us have physical strength and tools that will help clear away the debris and restore a modicum of order. Some of us have money, and that will surely be needed in massive amounts even to begin to replace what's been lost. Some of us have neither strength nor money, but we can pray to whatever supreme being we ascribe to. We've witnessed enormous natural disasters recently that have taken, not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of lives, leaving the survivors destitute in goods and in spirit. I beseach you to avoid placing the blame for our misfortunes on your personal God or on any God. Bad things happen to good people just as good things happen to bad people. It's how we deal with the hand we're dealt that counts in the end.
And now for those poems. The first is an expression of my take on the flow of life on this planet.

SPRINGFLOW

Bubbling burbliing brook,
The sound of wishing, swishing water
Rounding, bounding over boulders and pebbles,
The tremolo of ever present, already gone droplets of time.
Now joyful, then wistfull; finally mournful.
Opportunity coming-here-lost.
More promised; always coming,
Blink and they're gone.
The sound, the ripple,
The rhytym of life.

The second is an expression of my take on our journey through the universe, the final couplet being my requested epitaph.

THE ETERNAL ELLIPSE

As rise the lofty mountain peaks, seeming eternal in granite reality,
Upward too we mortals stretch, miming creation in stubborn certainty.

Man presumes too much from far too little,
Living but a jot as he spans the portal.

We expand within our rigid cage, bursting with pride in our endeavor
To break free of this self-made prison, seeking instead the great forever.

Eve, rib of Adam, ever Genesis of man's future soul,
Incomplete in herself, needing him to fulfill her role.

If we could watch from distant skies, earth's clocklike ebb and flow,
Mountains melt before our eyes, Eve reborn in the plains below.

Rain-delivered to earthly womb, form devolved but guaranteed,
The eternal ellipse at last is run, ever changing; forever indeed.

In our desire to stay the same, we miss the meaning of our claim.
Dust to dust, our earthly core; released to fly, our spirits soar!

May the God each of you prays to comfort and strengthen you to endure, to comprehend, and ultimately to triumph over your personal trials. Until we meet again...