In the hush of early days, a boy replied,
“I want to be a statue,”
carved in stone, unmoving,
famous beneath the sky’s wide eye.
Yet life refused the pedestal
and set him loose instead.
No certificates to frame his name,
he swung the cleaver, learned the blade,
apprentice butcher carving days
until the master’s title came,
then laid the knives down, walked away,
still becoming.
On Iona’s wind-scoured stones
he hauled the abbey back to light,
by night he read beneath the lamps,
dreaming student, youth to guide.
But currents shifted with the tide,
university called, and ministry.
Four years of ink, prayer, and fire,
three churches bloomed beneath his hand,
chaplain’s quiet, steady hours,
until the calling gently thinned.
He turned once more, returned to school,
became the teacher, loved it true,
China’s dragon roads unfurled
on trips where young eyes learned the world.
Retirement wrapped him like a shawl,
pensioner beneath the years,
yet in the quiet he recalled
an older, softer, youthful call.
Tao flowed through open palms,
mindfulness like morning calm,
and poems rose where once was prose,
three books born, and still they grow.
Statue, butcher, builder, priest,
teacher, pilgrim, man of peace,
none the final shape he wore,
each a garment, each outgrown.
He has always been the river,
never the stone.
So here I stand, still incomplete,
a sentence written, incomplete,
each chapter folds, another starts,
the journey is the work of art.
I am not what I have been;
I am Becoming.
