When pain assails your heart to tear it, <br />Your naked heart, its helpless prey, <br />Receive the gift of grief and bear it, <br />Soul of my dark departing day. <br /> <br />When times of torment strike unbidden, <br />With weeping eyes, through pain and stress, <br />You peer at mistery, dimly hidden: <br />God's ways are ways of deep distress... <br /> <br />We take the tasks that life enforces, <br />Grope to light its drabness bars <br />And raise the load of mundane courses <br />Up to the festival of stars. <br /> <br />And he, and only he, can sever <br />His ties with dust in throes of birth <br />Who loves the crown of thorns, forever <br />Renouncing all he owned on earth.<br /><br />Jurgis Baltrušaitis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/testament-of-grief/
