Thought Tapestries

When do you feel most productive?

I rose at nine and bent my back for fifty-eight long years,
From dawn till dusk the hammer fell, the ledger filled with tears
And triumphs, sweat, and callused hands that knew the weight of toil—
A lifetime stitched in honest thread across this mortal soil.

Then two months back the whistle blew, the workday clock went still,
And silence stretched like open fields beneath a quiet hill.
I wondered, Lord, what now for me?—this body old but free—
When all the measured years of work had shaped the man in me.

Yet here, in unexpected light, new rhythms softly play:
Not punch cards, deadlines, overtime—but words that find their way.
Random sparks from heaven’s forge, ideas wild and bright,
While God, the great Adventurer, keeps dancing through the night.

He plays, and I play too—my pen becomes a joyful tool,
Crafting poems like colored glass to show a God so full
Of grace that bends to broken ones, of mercy like the rain,
Of beauty woven into stars and ordinary days again.

No longer “productive” by the clocks that ruled my prime,
But fruitful in the secret hours when heart and heaven rhyme.
At sixty-seven, I have learned the truest work of all:
To sit with random, holy thoughts and answer when they call.

So let the old world chase its haste; I’ll chase the sparks instead—
God’s laughter in the quiet lines, new stories yet unread.
Retirement is no empty shore, but harbor for the soul
Where work and wonder intertwine, and making poems makes me whole.