A Simple Love Story
I truly wish I were a tree
and you were a vine growing up with me.
Our lives, forever, would be as one.
Our love would grow beneath the sun.
Living for love
would justify existence.
Our forest, in silence,
would give no resistance.
Sharing each moment,
Each movement,
Each breath,
'til life gives way
to our mutual death.
R. L. Rowland- 1994
The Truth is...
Once upon a time ticked away,
On a great or terrible day,
Whether wonderful, horrible or insignificant,
This life of death begot some new event.
And in some mind of human kind
A place in memory did it find.
Then the oral exaggeration tradition
or the written adulteration competition
Conveyed the occurrence, in a sense,
Advancing the decline of innocence-
With youthful reflections blurred by age
in mountainous prose transfused to page
or tappity type on bits of byte,
Searching for words to tell it right...
But all we say
or do
or see,
Exists then on as history.
R. L. Rowland- 1996
The King of Pride
(Inspired by King Solomon’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs)
A sliver of light
pierces the night,
Giving a blind man needed sight.
A soul left broken
from words unspoken,
Regret drains the last of his might.
Thin skin and bone
his emptiness shone,
This once was a King on his throne.
Crushed by this sorrow,
Today is tomorrow,
And now Pride rules his kingdom alone.
R. L. Rowland, 1996
The Mask
Frantically, on an endless task,
Laboring for what I did not ask,
I stop to rise and stretch,
Then beyond my eyes I catch
A glimpse of me in a paper mask.
The fading sunlight through the trees
Was playing devilish tricks on me
and as the summer wind
Dried the sweat on my skin
The pains of autumn struck my knees!
I contemplated what it meant,
My cask of reason nearly spent,
I thus began to see
This I in front of me
Beckoned me back to where I'd went:
The rocky trail that I had trod
of craggy crags and soggy sod
Those races left unrun,
Those glories left undone,
Are what had led me straight to God!
So yet once more this aging lad
With paper face so frail and sad
Must seek that trail again
and go back where I'd been...
Somewhere between Jesus and my Dad.
R. L. Rowland (Date uncertain)
Railroadthewriter 