It is not finished, Lord.

There is not one thing done,

There is no battle of my life,

That I have really won.

And now I come to tell Thee

How I fought to fail,

My human, all too human, tale

Of weakness and futility.

And yet there is a faith in me,

That Thou wilt find in it

One word that Thou canst take

And make

The centre of a sentence

In Thy book of poetry.

I cannot read this writing of the years,

My eyes are full of tears,

It gets all blurred, and won’t make sense

It’s full of contradictions

Like the scribblings of a child,

Such wild, wild

Hopes, and longing as intense

As pain, which trivial deeds

Make folly of—or worse:

I can but hand it in, and hope

That Thy great mind, which reads

The writings of so many lives,

Will understand this scrawl

And what it strives

To say—but leaves unsaid.

I cannot write it over,

The stars are coming out,

My body needs its bed.

I have no strength for more,

So it must stand or fall—Dear Lord—

That’s all.