If This Were All

If this were all of life we know

If this brief space of breath

Were all there is to human toil

If death were really death

And never should the soul arise

A finer world to see,

How foolish would our struggle seem,

How grim the world would be!

If living were the whole of life,

To end in seventy years,

How pitiful its joys would seem,

How idle all its tears!

There'd be no faith to keep us true,

No hope to keep us strong,

And only fools would cherish dreams,

No smile would last for long.

How purposeless the strife would be,

If there were nothing more,

If there were not a plan to serve,

An end to struggle for!

No reason for a mortal's birth

Except for him to die -

How silly all the goals would seem

For which men bravely try.

There must be something after death,

Behind the toil of man

There must exist a God devine

Who's working out a plan;

And this brief journey that we know

As life must really be

The gateway to a finer world

That someday we shall see.

E. A. G.

(presumed to be the poet Edgar A. Guest)

Note:  This poem is written in my mother's hand on the last page of a Bible I found while cleaning our my father's library in 1997.  The Bible is inscribed as follows:  "To Ruby Lee Perry:  For the best composition on the Life of Paul.  From your Leader….W. L Watkins" 

There is no date, but it must have been given to her in Park Street Baptist Church in Columbia, S.C., when she was a teenager.  It is one of only two writings I have in my mother's hand.

My mother did not live her "seventy years".  She died at age 33 on Christmas Day, 1941, when I was seven.  Two younger siblings died in their early years and her sister, Margaret Perry, died at age 21. Perhaps that is why this poem meant a lot to her.  

Until my children were born, I was the only surviving member of the Perry family. My father, James P. Wesberry died exactly 51 years after my mother, on Christmas Day 1992.  I look forward to the "gateway to a finer world"…James P. Wesberry, Jr.