When lilies of the field are pressed between the good book's pages, in sweet Lord Jesus' raiment dressed, their seeds endure for ages!
refrain
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace; it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.
The wheat upon the open plain, stretch forth their heads to pray; costume themselves in diamond rain, and their winnow fan array.
refrain
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace; it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.
Currents of the His saving waters, sweep in the ebb and flow; they bring a saving grace to me, and to the flowers to grow.
refrain
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace; it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.
See me at the harvest,
see me at the bee;
lay me up in in bundled straw
yearning to be free!
And when the harvest's over,
and no more stalks to scythe,
buy some time with lemonade,
and we shall be alive!
------ This was written in tribute to Fanny Crosby.
Her hymns are much better than this crude attempt, but she was a better religious person than me, too. The form is odd; at the end it jumps into a new meter...everything. I thought it a fault, but it is a metaphor for the time when everything will change. At the end "buy some time with lemonade..." may seem incongruous, to you as well to me, but it just was a picture of those who had passed were sheaves of wheat, cut down and laid up, in a barn or in the fields, where they wait - in barns where the late afternoon sun experiments with cracks and breaks in the carbolineum wall boards, and lights the dusty interior -
and by the time they wipe their lips dry, we shall have been re-born.
--
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6 comments:
This is sweet.
Fanny Crosby is a name I haven't thought of in such a long time. Growing up in my father and mother's churches - he the minister, she the pianist-music-choir-director - Crosby's name was as familiar as verses of the Bible.
My mom also composed music. In fact as choir director she badly wanted something for Mother's Day, some special song. So she wrote a hymn to Sibelius' Finlandia called "A Christian Home" and it is now sung far and wide on Mother's Day in the U.S. It is in many hymnbooks, and it's on her grave stone. So that is a thought, Montag. You can pick a tune that's already been written.
This also brought to mind what Don told me yesterday from his day in the classroom. This is why he is such a good teacher (3rd grade this year). He had apples in the room for snacks for those who forgot or don't have the means to take one. He had sliced one where a seed was perfectly dissected. The girl who was about to eat it asked him to magnify it with his magick projector, which made it huge. He gave a lesson about seeds, and pointed out the seed casing, and how it protects the seed. Then he described how an apple tree does not want more apple trees at its feet. It wants them to be taken away to make apples elsewhere.
The seed is certainly one of the beautiful archetypes in the Bible.
It sure is...and I really don't know why I used the seed; it just happened that way. It was orginally going to stay on full blooming lilies, but it did not.
I felt most moved by a vision of the faithful as stacks of hay or whatnot, bundled into the barn, and as the sun went down waiting for the coming dawn....that's why the ending switched so much from the beginning...
it was sort of like we shall be born again before the lemonade is dry upon the workman's cuff.
It was nice.
And, you know, come to think of it, it started after watching the film The Trip to Bountiful, with Geraldine Page - who was superb.
I starting singing "Softly and Tenderly" and "Blessed Assurance" to myself, and thus it began.
I am going to see if A Christian Home is on youtube, so I may hear it.
I do hope you'll pardon my quick diversion into my own matters of hymns in that comment, and here I go again. Did you find A Christian Home? I think it's there.
No.
Haven't had time to yet. I will after pots are clean.
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