Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

It is now 1981-82, my second and last year as Temporary Lecturer in English at the University of Georgia, teaching a full load of Freshman Composition while writing my dissertation.  The dissertation was on Edmund Spenser.  Can you tell?  Dr. Ewbank was my faculty adviser for my undergraduate degree in English.

On Spenserian Stanza

For Two Teachers: Edmund Spenser and Frances Ewbank.

When Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, he made

A brand new stanza up in which to frame

The glorious knights and ladies he portrayed

Triumphant over villains full of shame.

Ever different, yet still the same,

It had to hold up through the spacious land

Of Faerie from end to end, and flame

More bright with virtue there than e’er the hand

Of author had achieved, in verses quaint or grand.

Ottava Rima had the flow he needed,

But seemed in live a lady far too light

To shadow forth the gallant knights who heeded

The Code of Maidenheed and served the bright

And gracious Gloriana truly.  Might

A pensive sonnet cycle then avail?

But that would never serve to show the flight

Of narrative events in time.  The tale,

It seemed, must then be dight in wholly different mail.

Yet if the two could somehow be combined—

Could move with supple dignity, but yet

Be not in short, concise quatrains confined

Nor have its forward movement always let,

Caught in the closing couplet’s double net;

And yet still pause for needed contemplation—

With light impediment, enough to whet

The reader’s appetite for exploration—

Now that would truly be a gallant innovation!

Suppose we take Ottava Rima, add,

To slow its headlong plunge, a single line,

Rhyming with the last, but subtly clad

With just one extra foot to be a sign

Of need to sip with care such heady wine—

So came The Fairie Queene.  And there has been

No poem in which the Glory seemed to shine

More brightly since the storied epoch when

The Sweet Singer of Israel wielded the sword and the pen.

And thou, doctor mihi carissima,

Who showed me how to look with eyes undim

Upon the bright, the ars dulcissima

Of sacred Poesy, and thence to skim

Cream, not of just aesthesis, nor of whim,

But of the Truth well imaged forth, displayed,

Filling the cup of wisdom to the brim;

If worthily I now wield Spenser’s blade,

The praise is thine, who long hast labored, taught, and prayed.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

So why do we teach?  Only if we have a well thought out answer to that question can we hope to foster truly transformative learning.  And the only answer that begins to be adequate is that we do it out of love.  I encouraged the Kenyan faculty actively to cultivate three passions: love of the Lord, love of their subject, and love of their students.  It is only when all three are present and intelligently integrated that transformative teaching can emerge.

Love of the Lord has to come first.  Unless it does, love of the subject will degenerate into intellectual pride and love of the students into corrupted sentimentality.  But love for the Lord comes first not for those reasons but because He is the Lord of Glory, the eternal Word of the God of Truth, and the sacrificial Savior of our souls.  We love Him not for pragmatic reasons but because He first loved us, and because He is simply worthy of that position in our lives.  If we cannot see that most basic of truths, what else could we possibly have to teach?  What else could we teach with any accuracy or integrity?  For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, hence of learning—hence of teaching.     

Love of the God of Truth leads to love of a particular area of truth, a subject for which we have been given aptitude and to which we have been called to devote ourselves.  We take deep pleasure not just in its facts but in its terminology, its methodology, its grammar or structure, its history, its lore, its practical application, as things worthy of contemplation and pursuit for their own sake and the sake of their Creator and of our fellow man.  Without this love deeply ingrained in our hearts we will never overcome the demands on our time of job and family to stay fresh in the material, keep it up to date, and impart it with enthusiasm.  We cannot impart what we do not have.  Therefore, without this love we will be able fully to impart neither learning nor the love of learning, being inevitably deficient ourselves in both.

Love of the Lord and of the subject may suffice to make one a good Christian scholar; and this is an excellent and rare thing, not to be despised.  It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of fulfilling our calling.  Without the third love, though, we will never be good teachers.  We must love, not just students in the abstract, but our students, the very ornery, ill prepared, inattentive, lazy, and clueless people God has sent us (along with a few delights who are the opposite of all those more frequently encountered attributes).  How else shall we cut through their carefully cultivated ennui to reach them with the subject we love?  Where else shall we get the combination of earnest zeal and endless patience that it takes?  And why else would we expect them to listen?

If we have these three loves, we may be called to be teachers.  If we are to be effective teachers, we must not take their continuance for granted, but rather cultivate them daily.  Life has an almost infinite capacity to dull our hearts and minds, to bury us under trivial pursuits, to confuse us with the tyranny of the urgent, to wear us down by its daily grind.  “A man, Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “should keep his friendship in constant repair.”  It is good advice for those who would be friends of God, of learning, and of their students.

The love of God; the love of your subject; the love of your students: It is only when all three are powerfully present and intelligently integrated that transformative teaching can emerge.  May the God of Truth and of Love make it so in our lives, to the glory of His Son.  Amen.

 The Word of God, recorded in the Christian Bible, contains the personal revelation of the Creator of the Universe, including His wisdom, His commandments, His love, and His plan for the salvation and eternal fulfillment of His creatures.  The world of ideas gives us the cumulative experience and thinking of the human race as it follows or rebels against the Word of God in its history, its science, its philosophy.  If nothing more, it can keep us from spending our whole lives reinventing the wheel.  The world of imagination shows us the creative stirrings of the human spirit, stimulating our own spirits to make creative applications of what we learn from Scripture, history, and science.    

 Any of the three worlds to which reading gives us access—Scripture, Ideas, Imagination—can expand the mind in such a way as to facilitate things yet undreamt of (including better food production).  When we combine them together, their capacity to do so is increased exponentially.  So pursue the adventure of reading with all your might, both in school and out of it!  It was Newman’s Idea of a University recycled impromptu for an African context.  And I don’t think it’s a bad exhortation for American students either. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College

Editor, The Lamp-Post

Web Site:  http://doulomen.tripod.com

Blog:  www.journalofformalpoetry.com

E-Mail:  dtw@tfc.edu

 “To think well is to serve God in the interior court.”

– Thomas Traherne

Nevertheless, the phrase does have a kind of truth for a while–a day, a year, an age of men. I am “back” from Mythcon, the annual meeting of the Mythopoeic Society, in Dallas this year from July 9-12. But one never returns the same.

How to describe a Mythcon to those who have never been? Imagine a serious academic conference with world class papers and panels on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, the other Inklings, and fantasy literature in general breaking out in the midst of a Renaissance Festival, with an Inklings meeting, a fan convention, a film festival, a Society for Creative Anachronism meeting, a theology/apologetics conference, a spiritual retreat, and an insane asylum all going on concurrently–and you will have just an inkling (ahem) of the weirdest and most satisfying convocation of Inklings devotees on the planet. Picture this astounding conglomeration as a seamless whole in which each part enriches all the others and you will have an even better idea. But you will have to attend to really understand. Warning: Mythcon is highly addictive. Like the infamous potato chip, you cannot do just one.

This year I did a paper on Lewis’s view of truth. It was part II of “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C. S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Part I, Beauty, was last year. Beauty came first because for Lewis it was beauty, received as sensucht, that led Lewis to truth. But it was to truth that he thought he had arrived. In an age of Post-Modernism and Post-Foundationalism, the very concept of truth finds itself subject to deconstruction. Lewis held to the old “correspondence theory” of truth, but did so in a way that withstands contemporary assaults better than many traditional formulations because he sought to integrate Reason and Imagination in ways not typical of earlier philosophy. Essays like “Bluspels and Flalansferes” provide a framework for understanding Lewis’s statements on the nature of truth. They make possible a view of truth that is neither relativist nor reductive, but rather profoundly humane. Or so I tried to argue.

I also participated in a panel discussion of the influence of a writer’s religion on his work. Some were so opposed to “preaching” in literature that they seemed to imply an author’s faith should have no influence at all; they had a problem with passages like the one in Narnia when Aslan tells the children that they had met Him there so that they could learn to know Him in their own world. I maintained that an author writes out of his total personality, which includes his faith (or lack of it), and that this should not be shocking. Some Christian “writers” have palmed off on their readers sermons disguised as stories, and this is a problem, not with their content but with their craft. But abusus non tollit usum. The question is not whether Aslan should be allowed to say such a thing but rather whether the Narnia books present him consistently as a Lion who would and could say that kind of thing with credibility. Christians should appreciate a novel like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha because it lets them see the world through Buddhist eyes, and does it more effectively than any hundred treatises on comparative religion could ever hope to do. This understanding is a good thing, irrespective of whether it leads to conversion. Why shouldn’t non-Christians appreciate a work like Narnia in the same way? If they are afraid of being converted, let them be honest about that rather than blaming the work for daring to reflect its authors’ world view! For all works inevitably do.

My former student Brian Melton, a military historian, attended his first Mythcon and was absolutely enchanted. He also gave an excellent paper on War in Narnia, which was very well received. I was gratified to see him taking his place among the great Inklings scholars. Look for his name in the future!

And so I am back–but not the same. The other papers were almost all stimulating and enlightening. But what makes me feel that my own–not just understanding, but life–has been deepened is the level of integration between seriousness and fun, reason and imagination, intellect and heart, represented by the whole experience which is a Mythcon. The Inklings hold that kind or wholeness before us more effectively than any other group of writers, and their influence is not just celebrated but incarnated by the Mythies (as they call themselves) who gather around their works every year. I am blessed to be a part of it.

From Mr. Tumnus’ Library,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College
Editor, The Lamp-Post
Web Site: http://doulomen.tripod.com/
Blog: www.journalofformalpoetry.com

Once again this summer I had the privilege of ministering in Uganda and Kenya for Church Planting International and Christian life Teachings International (CLTI), the indigenous training ministry founded by Rev. John Robert Opio, one of the students on my first trip. I conducted a modular course in theology for two groups of rural pastors, one in Kitale, Kenya, and the other in Mbarara, Uganda. These are men in ministry who have had no opportunity to receive formal theological training. In these countries, the church is growing faster than it can train leaders. Since these men cannot go to Bible school, I take a little Bible school to them. With men of such zeal and dedication, a little goes a long way.

Thurs., 6/12-Sat. 6/14, 2010: Travel: Atlanta to Paris to Nairobi to Kitale, Kenya.

Sun., 6/20: AM, Preached at God’s Family Restoration Church, Kitale; PM, spoke to Kamukuya Pastor’s Fellowship, 21 pastors and elders representing seven village ministries from Pentecostal to Baptist.

Mon., 6/21-Thurs., 6/24: Modular course in Survey of Christian Doctrine taught to 34 pastors and church leaders.  For seven of them it was their last course with CLTI leading to a certificate in Christian ministry.

On the second day of the Kenya seminar, we covered the doctrine of the Trinity with special reference to Islam. Why do Muslims think Christians are polytheists? How can we get past that impasse? What does the doctrine of the Trinity actually affirm? Not that we simultaneously believe that there is one God and that there are three Gods–that would be a contradiction. Rather, there is one God who contains three Persons. This is merely incomprehensible, not contradictory. We went over a lot of Scripture that affirms as true the following propositions: there is only one God, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct persons, not just three different names for God. The doctrine of the Trinity is simply the only way to affirm the simultaneous truth of all these biblical statements.
There are four reasons to believe that the doctrine of the Trinity is true.  1.  The bible teaches it. 2.  Allah is just too simple. Any God I could understand without difficulty must by that fact be a false God.  3.  If God were a simple monotheistic deity like Allah, the incarnation would be impossible—for how should God abandon Heaven for existence as a Man and still rule the world?  Only a Trinitarian God could become incarnate without abdicating the throne of the universe.  Therefore, only the Trinity can save; Allah cannot.  4.  Only if the Trinity is the true account of God could the affirmation that “God is love” be meaningful. Before creation, there would be no one for Allah to love; but the Father, the Son, and the Spirit loved each other in the unity of the Godhead from all eternity, and now through faith in Christ invite us to share that love with them for all of future eternity. Now, that’s a God worth believing in!

In sum, the incomprehensibility of the Trinity is in the light of the above facts actually an asset to Christian faith, not a liability.  The Muslims cry, “Allah U’Akbar!”  “Allah is great!”  But we have already discovered two very important things that the God of the Bible can do and which Allah cannot do: save and love.  How great can Allah be?
There was a lot of intense attention to the apologetic points against Islam, because these people have Muslim neighbors. One man said, “I thought I was coming to a seminar, and I find myself in college!” Not quite–he doesn’t have to write a paper or read a systematic theology textbook (and a couple of C. S. Lewis books!) in addition to the biblical texts. But his unintentional hyperbole has a point–that is exactly what I was invited to bring these men.

Tues., 6/20: After the class ended for the day, spoke to an assembly of St. Philip’s Secondary School, Kitale, and then addressed the faculty separately after the students were dismissed.  I spoke to the students on the adventure of reading.  There is a poster one sees in Kenya that proclaims, “Literacy for Improved Food Production!”  I don’t doubt that improved food production is a worthy goal and that literacy can help attain it, I said; but there is so much more to reading than that!  It makes available to us the Word of God, the world of ideas, and the world of imagination—all of which can expand the mind in such a way as to facilitate things yet undreamt of (including better food production).  It was Newman’s Idea of a University recycled impromptu for an African context.  I encouraged the faculty to actively cultivate two things: love of their subject and love of their students.  It is only when both are present that transformative teaching can emerge.

Fri., 6/25: CLTI Graduation.  We had a graduation ceremony for seven students who had completed the whole pastoral training course from Christian Life Teachings International. After the service and before the recessional, an African graduate’s family and friends will come up and drop garlands of tinsel over their mortar-boarded heads, so that during the photo session afterwards (which puts most weddings to shame) they look like walking Christmas trees with black trunks (the bottoms of their robes still showing beneath). During the next American graduation I have to endure, I will be sure to remember that it could be worse!
The Valedictorian, Peter Sisunga, included in his speech–really a fiery sermon–some things he learned from me two years ago. That made me think maybe I’m not wasting my time here after all! Some of my American students have difficulty remembering things I said two weeks–er, sometimes two days—ago.
Sat., 6/26: Travel to Mukono, Uganda.

Sun., 6/27: Preach at Campus Church of Uganda Christian University.  The visit to Uganda Christian University in Mukono (Evangelical Anglican) was a great success. My sermons to campus church congregations of about 1,000 (first service) and 200 (second) were very well received. The Rev. Canon Frederick Baalwa, the campus chaplain, was astonished that I had actually presented the text and topic he had asked for (“The Place of Authority in Christian Leadership,” Mark 10:42-5). “That was powerful,” he said. Christian leadership is the theme for this term. When I saw the whole programme I was impressed with how he had broken it down. Perhaps the best thing that came of our short time there was making a connection between Rev. Baalwa and Rev. Opio. Baalwa was quite taken with the vision and ministry of CLTI and said that there were many rural Anglican (Church of Uganda) congregations led by lay preachers who desperately needed just what John Opio is doing. They soon had their heads together plotting blessings for the Kingdom–a wonderful ecumenical moment. Baalwa was astounded that I, a Muzungu (white man), was taking Public Transport to Mbarara. “You really practice the servant leadership you preach!” he marveled. Apparently Muzungus on public are a great rarity. There is a reason why.

If God has put anything in the world to remind us of human weakness, it must be the African public transportation system. The journey from Kampala to Mbarara Sunday afternoon–about 280 kilometers to the West–took a full eight hours of being bumped and pounded half to death. But I survived to begin the second week of classes

Mon., 6/28-Weds., 6/30: Second Modular Theology Course, at Mbarara, Uganda.  I used the same material as in Kenya but covered less of it because many of the men (and women leaders too) are even less prepared academically than the CLTI students I had in Kenya. Sometimes here it takes a while just to explain something to the interpreter so he can render it. In Kenya, half of the students were confident enough in English to ask their questions in English. Here, almost no one is. So the interpreters are even more essential, but they too are less prepared. Nevertheless, we are accomplishing some good teaching.  The Trinity explained as a positive response to Islam rather than a theological liability was a hit here too.

One encouraging factor in Mbarara was that several of these students had already seen through the Prosperity Gospel on their own–unusual in Africa. They were asking for effective ways to combat it. Apparently “Name it and claim it” translates into Lyancole as “Take it! Take it!” So I said, just ask people to read the Gospels and ask them whether they are seeing a Jesus who says “Take it!” or one whose message is “Give it!” Was Paul in perfect health right after being stoned and left for dead? Where was his faith? Was Jesus lacking in faith because He had no place to lay his head? This theology is not just wrong, it is blasphemous! What of the Missionaries who first brought the Gospel to Uganda? They packed in their coffins because they expected to die from Malaria–yet they came anyway. Aren’t we glad their preachers weren’t saying, “Take it! Take it!”  Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?

Thurs., 7/1: Preached to midweek service of Ruti Reformed Presbyterian Church in Mbarara and addressed an assembly of Hillside Primary School in nearby Biharwe.

Fri.-Sat., 7/2-3: Journey home via Kampala, Entebbe, Amsterdam, Paris, and Atlanta.

Summary: Preached in five services at four churches, spoke to two Pastor’s Fellowships and two school assemblies, held two training seminars for about seventy pastors and church leaders, and spoke at one graduation service in two weeks of intense ministry.  Pray that the men who attended the seminars will commit what they heard to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. That way, the church will be strengthened and the mission will have been a success.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

I can empathize with this lady’s mystification at her friends’ inability to follow Lewis, but I have run into the phenomenon too many times to be surprised by it any more.  Because some of the people whom I’ve encountered with this disability have been my students, I have had an opportunity to study the syndrome up close in some detail.  It is not due to any lack of clarity or failure to be engaging on Lewis’s part.  The real culprit for many postmodern readers is their inability to follow a linear argument–any linear argument.  Often in Lewis, in other words, the ability to “get” the paragraph you are in depends on your having gotten the one that preceded it.  Many people today have such short attention spans that they can only deal with soundbytes and get frustrated by anyone who expects them to put two and two together to arrive at four, however plainly he maps out the path for them.  Or, worse, they have actually been taught to be suspicious of discursive Reason as something that has nothing to do with reality and which can only lead them astray.

Lewis’s linearity is a virtue, not a fault, and I stoutly maintain that we should not respond to the abysmal failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking (or even foster the conditions that make it possible) by dumbing down the Faith (or its most winsome representative).  That would be to falsify and misrepresent it, and therefore to lose the very reason why we should be caring whether people can follow it in the first place.  For some (if they have the patience for it, or an ornery professor who won’t let them out of it), Lewis can be a bridge out of the soundbyte solipsism they naturally inhabit into the larger world of rationality.  For some; not all.  That even Lewis cannot reach many is the greatest indictment of our so-called education system I can think of.  Remember that Mere Christianity was written for uneducated British laymen of the 1940’s.  They got it because they had not had their ability to think destroyed like “educated” modern Americans have.

It’s all in Lewis!  It’s all in Lewis!  What DO they teach them in those schools?

From Mr. Tumnus’ Library,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College
Editor, The Lamp-Post
Web Site:  http://doulomen.tripod.com
Blog:  www.journalofformalpoetry.com
E-Mail:  dtw@tfc.edu

P.S.  I leave for Africa tomorrow.  Your prayers for the mission would be appreciated. — DW

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

This poem was once rejected by a major literary journal (which shall remain nameless) on the grounds that the editor did not see any reason why the subject demanded a sonnet.  Let us just say that fourteen lines do not a sonnet make.  So much for the supposed expertise of our cultural gatekeepers.  But why shouldn’t the poem have been a sonnet if it had wanted to?  So much for the alleged wisdom of those gatekeepers.  Wordsworth or Keats would have known better!  While this fourteen line poem is not a sonnet of any kind, I do think it has an intriguingly intricate rhyme scheme.

On One of the Functions of Morning

When the first fingers of light steal through the grass,

Angling down through spaces between the limbs

Of trees, greeting the ground-fog as they pass,

The separate the darkness into shadows

That stretch out lengthwise clear across the meadows.

I have been up a time or two, on whims,

Early enough to see it come to pass.

For it is shy, this light that flits and skims

And touches everything so very lightly.

As imperceptibly as starlight dims

It fades to greater brightness, slips away

Before the bolder light that’s merely day,

And leaves the lucky ones it touches slightly

More inclined to follow after whims.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

One of Luther’s most serious disciples was Johan Sebastian Bach, the greatest contrapuntist (some would say the greatest composer) who ever lived.  This is the first of a number of attempts to get something of the quality of Bach’s music down in words—a task not ever to be completely achieved!  How do you express the idea of, not just one note interacting with other notes to form the harmony, but whole melodies interacting with each other?  The acrostic, among other things, tries to capture something of the multilayered nature of Bach’s work.

Bach

Joining word to pitch and pitch to time,

Sounds line up to flow into the air.

Bach could make whole lines with lines to rhyme

And flow in streams of thought beyond compare.

Christ gave him this grace, to let us hear

His angels’ songs with (now!) the fleshly ear.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

Even people who do not agree with him admire Protestant Reformer Martin Luther for standing up for his convictions.  What many people do not understand is that his famous “Here I stand!” was not simply a bold assertion of modern individualism but sprang from much serious agonizing over what Scripture was telling him.  It was faithfulness to God’s truth as he understood it, not rebellion against church authority, that drove him.

Martin Luther

Sonnet XXXV

Can one lone monk be right, and all the rest

Of Christendom for near a thousand years

Be wrong?  The question brought him close to tears

And troubled Luther sorely, he confessed.

But other problems had to be addressed,

Like, shall the Gospel reach the waiting ears

Of people whose good works were in arrears

And had no chance but Grace to pass the test?

He meant by that just simply every man,

And thought of men who’d lived by faith before—

And doubted then his Gospel’s truth no more:

With Athanasius contra mundum, and

With John the lone disciple at the Cross,

He clung to Christ and viewed all else as loss.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

This poem marks a couple of momentous moments.  One was the loss of our dog, who had gotten out of her yard and disappeared only to be found later dead on the road.  The other is the composition of my first villanelle.  The villanelle is one of the most challenging verse forms in the language: six triplets in iambic pentameter rhyming ABA, etc., until the last stanza adds an extra A line to end in a couplet.  The catch is that lines one and three have to be substantially repeated as the final lines of the following triplets, alternating until they come together in the last stanza as the final couplet.  In one way it’s easy.  When you finished three lines, you already have a third of the rest written!  But the trick is to make the repeated lines sound like they would completely naturally have been there anyway.  Now that is hard!

The advantage is that if you do it well, there is an intensity bound by rigid limits that lends itself to containing otherwise uncontrollable emotion.  The best example of this use is Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle on the death of his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”  This one is not lacking in a certain similarity to that one.

Farewell to Snoopie: A Villanelle

(No. 1)

The once lithe body lay too large, too long:

The proportions were off, the head’s angle strange;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Something about the way the limp legs hung

Boded less wandering, a shrunken range.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

Never before had I seen her without a song

Of bugle-haunted greeting in glad refrains;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

The silk ears once in gay abandon flung

Were still, and their position did not change:

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

A fly crawled slowly undisturbed along

The nose; fur rose in wind foreboding rains.

Something about it certainly was wrong.

And standing there, I felt no longer young

And thought age no great bargain in exchange.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Donald T. Williams, PhD