Lost Poems (2) *

Repentance

My sad soul stoops,
Beneath it's heavy guilt bent double.
As conscience scoops
And prints the headlines of spent trouble.
And once again
Forgotten thorns that hardly scratching
Caused little pain
As gaping wound now cry for patching.

Much more than fear
Must motivate my plea for healing;
More than a tear
That cultivates self-sorry feeling.
I must repent.
The prayers I paid as vain regrets,
The thinking lent
To would-have-beens and fancy frets
I must withdraw.
Then when the whole is reinvested
I may be sure
Sin more than sorrow is detested.

Until that hour
God's grace can only give forgiving.
And selfish power
Will hold another son from living.
For holiness,
(Both root and fruit of true repentance-
Pure selflessness,)
Hates more the crime and less the sentence.


*I recently found an old Amstrad PCW 9512 disc in a box; the disc was simply labelled poems. I found a company in Cornwall who converted the contents of the disc to Word documents I discovered a whole load of poems I had written and lost. Most of these poems were written either just after my conversion (some possibly before).