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Show Passion Kenneth Farley OH PASSION- You servant to many masters, Friend to heaven and hell alike; You seeming uncontrollable tide in life, Sweeping men on to glory or eternal doom; Explain yourself, oh mystic power, What is your purpose in this life's hour? Betimes you come a serpent creeping, Into the hearts of men; Filling their souls with a hateful venom, Distorting minds, destruction, reeking. Why do you fill men's hearts with woe, That the fires of hell might keep aglow? Like the troubled waters of a geyser giant, Erupting men's souls to erratic heights, Filling men's hearts with a moment's joy; His energies spent, back Into the darkened pit he totters, Into ever boiling, fickle waters. For ignorant men, no mind of reason; Mother of Ambition's flame; For love of gold, false treason's rebels; Oh soul of Satan-Arch enemy to Holy Fame, Under your false cloak of patriotic pride, Wars are fought and laws of God defied. YET PASSION- Under your spell the masters sighed In songs of forgotten lore. For freedom's right our fathers perished On countless fields of gore. In fire of spring the birds, their sweetest music make, And Mother Nature's fairest pictures paint. For love of truth our martyrs' tombs, Their crosses nobly borne; In selfish strife great Caesars brave Have died on ambition's throne. Was it your same magic power King Solomon's temple built, and Bable's tower? Like a flooded river flowing to the sea, Checked suddenly in its course; Into a lake of power forms, Which, taken bit by bit, contains The prestige of the whole, yet ne'er exhausting Drives men on to victory. The Nile Helen Wilson I. By the Nile, the mystery of ages- The Sphinx, enigmatic has lain Monstrous, forbidding and awful, It embodies the sorrow and pain, The unceasing turmoil and anguish That the heathen for ages endures; It signifies, cold and relentless, The unswerving faith of the Moors. II. Strange, unempassioned and useless, It remains as a monument To the weird, dark creeds of the Far East, And the evil they represent. Yet like the evil so ruthless It embodies, the Sphinx is today Slowly, inevitably crumbling, And falling in dust away. III. The clear, pure, spirit of goodness And benevolence, friendship and love, Unceasing, find their presentation In the man that God fashioned above. Delicate, small and soft yielding, As compared with the far-famed Sphinx, Yet the image of man in its glory, With the spirit of Godliness links. IV. Charity, kindness and mercy; On these virtues, God's system depends. For man is the medium of happiness, And thru him all blessings He sends. Build on, O ye fatuous Pharaohs infamous, Your idols of darkness and day; 'Tis only the soul, love-created, That will last in God's sight, for aye. |