Jack Pelham

There comes that moment
In the consideration of a thing
When a man tells himself
He understands it.

It’s a funny thing about the writer—
Who knew how to put his finger
On something we could not—
To see a thing we had not yet seen—
To fill in the blanks
About which we had only wondered so far—

If he tastes and sees that the Lord is good,
Will he not take more?

Yet, year after year,
He takes no more—
So far as we can see—
Even as he assures us that
“The Lord is good, indeed!”
And makes excuses as to why
He is not full by now.

I re-post this 2021 post from my Facebook page in honor of my son James’ 19th birthday.

My son’s a man today, in conventional thinking. But he does not come by it suddenly. It did not come upon him all at once when the calendar turned over to his 18th year.

No, he learned part of manhood when I explained to him at 3 years old that the more he would obey, the more I could trust him—and that he’d get to do more things that way.He learned part of it when he and I buried his little sister together at the cemetery—when we made that task our own, rather than letting someone else take care of it for us.

He learned it through the spankings he got,

When has God ever—
That Almighty,
That King of Kings,
That Lord of Hosts,
That Creator of us all—

When has he ever,
In all his boundless power,
Made a man more righteous
Than the man was willing to be?

The more I learn how to ask good questions,
The more people I meet who avoid them,
Some of whom are those who do not seem
To like the answer, “I don’t know”,
And who will pretend that they do.

They are not the sort to be
Explorers,
Discoverers,
Examiners.
They have ruled out surprise.

If I should live a thousand years,
I shall never understand
Why they have such outrage
Over calling a liar a liar
And none over the lie itself—
Unless it is because,
In calling out the lie,
The challenger is threatening the very essence of their being—
Desecrating the twisted religion—
Toppling the idol of the lying class—
That being, of course, the lie itself.

They tell me I do many things well,
But in having learned to do this many things well enough
That they should have gotten this impression of me,
I have discovered this fortunate irony:
I have learned that I could do most all these things better,
And beyond that, that I could learn
To do yet more things well,
Should opportunity and interest ever align.

When God made man, both male and female,
He made them that they should give a formal account for themselves
When it was all said and done, at least—
If not from time to time before that
In special cases.
This was the nature of the reality
Into which the human life was set;
It was a certainty.
This was the set
And they were the cast
And the play was on.

Even in this darkness,
Where one gets the feeling
That the evil fashion of the day
Is viler than the market will truly
Bear in the long run—
And that the wearied masses are,
For the most part,
Just quietly going with the flow—
Some for just not caring much,
And others for fear of the backlash
They know would befall any protester—
Where what is supposed to be
Generously accepted by all today
Would have been a scandal had it been
Even whispered about by our grandparents—