5 Dialogues: 3 With All Your Strength

Do Come if you can!

Here is the third of my five dialogues on the two great commandments. I described the whole sequence in this post. The poems are taken from my new book Parable and Paradox, available from Amazon or on order from any bookshop. do come to the launch at Girton college on 14th June at 5:15 if you are free. This sequence will also feature on my new record Songs and Sonnets. Click here to learn more and support the project if you wish. This second poem in the series reflects on what it might mean to love with all my strength. As always you can hear the poem by clicking on the title or the play button.

Luke 10:27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

III With All Your Strength

 

With all my strength? What little strength I have

Is shadowed by the instruments of death.

I crawl from dawn to dusk towards my grave

As frail and fleeting as my every breath,

And all the strength of broken humankind

Seems only spent on pain and cruelty,

To magnify the malice of the mind

And crush the poor in deeper poverty.

 

And that is why you need to love with strength, 

And offer all that little strength to me,

That you might let me mend it, till at length

We bear the weight together, set you free,

As one who knows how all is borne above,

And meets all malice in the strength of Love.