God's Battleground



God dwells in you; in pride and shame,
In all you do to blight or bless;
In all you are of praise and blame,
In beauty or in ugliness.
"Divine Creation" - What a fraud!
God did not make you . . . You make God.

God lives in me, in all I feel
Of love and hate, of joy and pain,
Of grace and greed, or woe and weal,
Of fear and cheer, of loss and gain:
For good or evil I am He,
Yea, saint or devil, One are we.

God fends and fights in each of us;
His altars we, or bright or dim;
So with no sacerdotal fuss
But worthy act let's worship Him:
Goodness is Godness - let us be
Deserving of Divinity.

And of His presence be aware,
And by our best His love express;
A gentle word is like a prayer,
A kindly act is holiness:
Don't let God down; let Him prevail
And write his AMEN to our tale.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

50 sec read
102

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABACXX DEDEFF CGCGFF HBHCII
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 768
Words 166
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 6

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

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