Karma by Ella Wheeler Wilcox — Read

I. We cannot choose our sorrows. One there was / Who, reverent of soul, and strong with trust, / Cried, ‘God, though Thou shouldst bow me to the dust, / Yet will I praise thy everlasting laws. / Beggared, my faith would never halt or pause, / But sing Thy glory, feasting on a crust. / Only one boon, one precious boon I must / Demand of Thee, O opulent great Cause. / Let Love stay with me, constant to the end, / Though fame pass by and poverty pursue. ' / With freighted hold her life ship onward sailed; / The world gave wealth, and pleasure, and a friend, / Unmarred by envy, and whose heart was true. / But ere the sun reached midday, Love had failed.

II. Then from the depths, in bitterness she cried, / ‘Hell is on earth, and heaven is but a dream; / And human life a troubled aimless stream; / And God is nowhere. Would God so deride / A loving creature's faith? ' A voice replied, / ‘The stream flows onward to the Source Supreme, / Where things that ARE replace the things that SEEM, / And where the deeds of all past lives abide. / Once at thy door Love languished and was spurned. / Who sorrow plants, must garner sorrow's sheaf. / No prayers can change the seedling in the sod. / By thine own heart Love's anguish must be learned. / Pass on, and know, as one made wise by grief, / That in thyself dwells heaven and hell and God. '