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Autumn Leaves

Chapter 44: “WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?”
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About This Book

A compact poetry collection gathers short lyrical and didactic pieces that reflect on mortality, memory, love, duty, and spiritual consolation, often using nature and seasonal imagery to frame moral and emotional insights. Many poems shift between wistful reverie and exhortation, imagining dreamlike flights, harvest metaphors about deeds and consequences, prayers, meditations on motherhood and friendship, and speculative lines about reincarnation and the afterlife. The work mixes tender sentiment, moral counsel, and pastoral description across brief, accessible poems that alternate consolation with sober reminders of life's hardships.

“WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?”

O man with all thy knowledge,
Dost know what brought thee here?
Dost know the law of living?
To die is not more drear
Than living on uncertain
Of what the future state.
Is death annihilation?
Is it to be our fate?

O th’ myst’ry of our coming!
From what were we evolved?
O th’ myst’ry of our going!
Will it be ever solved?
We’re filled with dark forebodings,
We know not what our end.
Is there a power that governs?
If so, we to it bend.

Shall we e’er know the myst’ries,
The problems that we meet
At every stage of living;
With fear we e’er them greet.
What may be in the future?
The present we deplore.
The past hath been a failure,
With shadows e’er before.

An angel heard my questions,
And sorrowed at my fears.
“O know that God is mindful
Of man; though it appears
That man is aye complaining,
Not trusting to the Power
That gave to him existence,
And blessings on him shower.”