Monday Poetry Train #22

Happy Toes II by Kim Garraway
print for sale at art.com

Legacy of Laughter
by Joy Renee

Sarah--
One of laughter, one of love.
Your upwelling, out-flowing,
Inundating exuberance
Revealed the essence
Of life to us:
To live is to love,
To love is to live.

Your ebullient soul--
A dancing rainbow
--barely restrained
By body or mind,
Shimmered in your eyes, in your smile,
In the play of your hands
On their every find.
“I’m alive! I’m alive!”
They seemed to say.
“And I will love you
With all that I am.”

Then, with a SLAM
A door shut and you were gone,
Leaving behind but
Echoes of your laughter,
Memories of your love,
As you rushed to the arms
Of that One who Loved us all Alive.

This our comfort and our hope:
Knowing that there your soul dances
In unfettered Joy.
And that soon--Even so Lord!--
Soon we shall see you face to face
And join with you in His embrace.

In memoriam: Sarah Lynn M. 1973-1989

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Sarah was the adopted daughter of my cousin. She was a special needs child. I was fifteen when she was born. She was the first baby I bonded with. I couldn't have loved her more if she had been my own. She died suddenly at age sixteen.

Her death is coupled in my mind with the beginning of the end of my unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines I'd been raised with. Not due directly to her death but because the doctrinal disputes that had been simmering for decades among our twenty or so assemblies had begun to boil over. I did not know it consciously until 1992 but my quest had begun by 1987 because I had started to ask questions that could not be answered from inside the approved system of reasoning.

Since then I've learned that religion is not the only system of thought that can get doctrinaire and dogmatic.

Whenever I am tempted to despair by the incorrigible mean-spiritedness of so many of the debates among and between religions, nations, ideologies, and the sciences, I remember Sarah and what she taught me about the meaning of life.