The Wells

At my dad's memorial service I read a poem that he wrote long before he was ill with Valley Fever, about four years before he was married. I think it might have been before or right around the time he came to Grace.

A couple people requested that I post it somewhere, so here it is. It wasn't titled, so I gave it one. :)


The Wells

My soul is troubled, I do not see them!
My heart is full, but there is no release.

The end of my journey is near,
But my legs are weary from striving.
I would crawl if I could
But my hands burn on the dust of the ground.

My eyes are caked with dust and sweat.
Faith is my only hope.
Hands of the masters have ripped my clothes,
The sun scorches my skin.

The birds of the dead circle in the sky,
But still I seek for the living water.
But the heat of the world is so oppressive
That I long to return to its dust.

My body collapsed, my soul cried out,
“I can’t go on, I have to stop!”
My senses are numbed, my sight destroyed,
And I despair for all is lost.

The tears of my heart washed clean my eyes
And I beheld the wells at my side!
For I received the promise in ages past
That when all was lost, the wells I would find.
They were overflowing with the water I sought.
I had trusted in God, and He was sight.

Mike Taylor
April 21, 1979

Remembered

After my dad died, I remembered reading this a few years ago. It stuck out to me at the time when I read it and was the main section of the book that I learned from. Our memories definitely play an important role in our lives.

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
"Perhaps some of them do," said Ransom. "But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear one splendid line over again?"
...
"the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem."
...
"Undoubtedly," he said. "Maleldil made us so. How could there ever be enough to eat if everyone had twenty young? And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?"

- C.S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet