Ph: Echo: Ode To A Feather Poem by Brian Johnston

Is the pen not mightier than the sword?
Are your words not still thunder and lightning?
Are they not springs that others have only to sip from
To see their own immortality in black and white
Or in tasting your cup, die in ecstatic communion
Knowing that they have served God in loving you
And in this sweetest of deaths, awake to God's Presence?
Like the thief on the cross who in acknowledging Christ
Was told, ‘This day you shall be with me in paradise! '
How can you not know this about yourself?

You certainly have a following….
To reverse the usual sexual metaphor,
Just where is the ink well
You could not dip your quill into
And is not the quill (the base of a feather)
In fact the doppleganger of the same instrument
That starts wars, beheads kings,
Draws national boundaries, and dissolves fortunes?
Do you intend to put us off our guard
By comparing yourself to a helpless feather
Enslaved to the vagaries of an unpredictable breeze?

Wow, the tabloids are having a field day!
Why would you have yourself brought up on charges?
How is it possible love can be a capital offense?
Really, dear poet, what were you thinking?
Please plead temporary insanity
Or depression that overwhelmed you,
Blame it on your parents,
Say that someone put acid in your Dr. Pepper,
Then throw yourself onto the mercy of the court.
You know there will not be a dry eye anywhere…

The only love in danger of disappearing is self-love,
Self-love that is, in fact, blessed by God and not fake.
Your only real salvation is to realize that you are loved,
Your only chance for happiness is to give up being a victim.
If you get that loving another (and being loved)
Are choices that only you have power over,
Please let this sink in, being a victim is also a choice,
And, dear poet, it is a choice that no friend wants you to make.
It is not now and can not be, a spell others cast upon you
However sad that might sound in a poem.
You do not need to win our sympathy, WE ARE YOU!
The only love anyone can lose, is love that they reject,
And even then, though they are blind to it,
It is there (and theirs) , eternally theirs, forever …..
Choose for that reason alone to live your days in joy
And in the face of the unknown, always choose life.