All My Trials - My Version

I wrote some new lyrics to add to the old folk tune "All My Trials" for church service at Tyler SDA church.  The congregation provide backup vocals on the chorus. You can hear them back there adding body to the chorus.  I'm not a great singer, but the first special music I ever did in church was this song at the Weslaco SDA Church and I was terrified.  I kinda wanted to do a better job on this one at least once. 

The Letter of the Law

An Abecedarian by Tom King

(c) 2012

1. At the
2. Beginning
3. Cold fangs and teeth
4. Death the punishment
5. Every sin's consequence.
6. Fight or flight should you rebel
7. Gods of stone arose, whose priests claimed
8. Heavy-handed blood sacrifices
9. Incantations, homage to holy men
10. Jibber, mutter and perpetuate a fraud
11. Kings privilege upheld by crude ritual.
12. Laws of love, forgotten since creation could set free.
13. Men and women bound, with chains of stone and gold and silver.
14. None remembering the law each carries writ upon the soul.
15. On every heart formed in every womb that bore a son or daughter.
16. Proof enough, the signature of the Law Giver waiting love's waking
17. Quickened at the mountain, carved first in stone, then in blood and bone and sinew,
18. Risen again a living law, every man, woman and child the law breathing.
19. Still and small transforming from the inside out and not with brute force from outside in.
20. The law from which springs life and peace and hope was always there, waiting patiently for us
21. Until we found it, or it found us , transformed us, not into what it wanted us to be but
22. Verily into what we are without the baggage of the laws meant to oppress and enslave.
23. We are servants of a law that sets us free, that we may be beautiful, kind, patient, wise and good.
24. X-ing out the laws that bind us in the darkness, restoring the indwelling law we know already. 
25. Yet still we are creation's children, though for a time we had forgotten the blessings of the ancient law.
26. Ziggurats, temples, pyramids, blood altars, steles and graven stone, the corpses of old lies by love defeated.

* Author's note: Wrote this as part of a poetry class I taught online. We were studying abecedarian forms where you begin each line or stanza with a different letter of the alphabet - like an acrostic, but a bit harder thanks to the Q, X and Z. Try one, it's great poetical exercise.  - Tom

Press Conference

Press Conference

Alone, twisting in the wind
Silent, nothing left to say

I do not know this place

I cannot hear the music

Frustrated, I search for a chord

No longer playable.

Rejoicing, sounds of it drift this way

Celebration, at my downfall evidently.

I helped bring this about

I stood shoulder to shoulder

Gloating, they rob me of something

I freely gave them.

Impending, it hangs dark in the air.

Threatening, punishment for something I did not do.

I think my father's thoughts

"People are no damned……"

I push them away the thoughts

Which are not mine but his, but though

Depressing, I know they're sometimes true.

by Tom King (c) 2009