Beauty From Ashes

This is a poem I wrote for my dad while I was on my mission. I decided to post it because I want to write about God's ability to create beauty from ashes, and this poem helped me to see the good that could come from losing someone I loved deeply.

Again, I take comfort in knowing that no one really reads this blog, so I don't have to give a disclaimer for how lame the poem could be. It came from my heart and helped me work through some heavy stuff.

Of all the hours I made my music in that empty upstairs room,

My greatest of achievements was my audience was you.

You thought silently leaning in the doorway of my sculpted tonal shades

Would leave you undiscovered, but your spirit was too great.

You always walked through life like that, tip-toeing into souls,

You used those neglected verbs of truth, in a language now unknown.

How we had grieved when the world lost your loved and noble image,

Then light came on a breeze of truth: those you loved now speak your language.

I remember how one day I sat, inside our empty home.

I couldn't stand to see your pen and lap-top, laid there by your phone.

From a desperate act of confusion, I stood in front and stared,

At a Barnes and Noble, thinking I would find you there.

They didn't have your Tao book, or "The Hiding Place",

All they had to give me was a memory of your face,

And how your wisdom seemed so tangible, lighting up your soul.

Truth comes through the window: I hadn't lost you after all.

Sometimes I am a captive, and shroud myself in black,

I am blind to my full treasury, seeing only what I lack.

But if I reach and dip my hand into fearless, lighted beams,

Truth, once again, tears down walls much weaker than they seemed.

Ashes trailed your chapter, by the burning pain of change,

With mournful, heavy lingering, in the absence of your page.

But now a wind of truth liberates me, and in awe I searched and found,

From ashes, divine beauty grows up from fertile ground.