A Coin With Two Sides
Spring
by
Alan L. Strang
Spring time is here with its sunshine and showers,
All nature is waking from its long winter sleep.
The gardens are blooming with beautiful flowers,
The song-birds are carolling melodies sweet.
Alan L. Strang (1908 – 1919) was born in Spokane, Washington. His family moved to Redwood City, California when he was four years old. Highly intelligent but physically frail from birth, Alan wrote a number of poems as a child, many of which were collected in a book published the same year in which he died–at age 11.
This morning I read some excerpts from Beyond Good And Evil, and also from The Gay Science. Nietzsche, always a adamant critic of Christianity, regards the two thousand year history of his European religion nothing other than a slave revolt. The French Revolution was the last eruption of rage-filled rejection of the noble sense that life entails suffering. Life is temporary, fraught, and must be returned to whatever, or whomever is it’s source. Suffering is life’s price, the cost of the admission ticket to be.
Christianity spins the human lot to be a positive. Christianity has not changed since Nietzsche penned these observations in the late 19th century.
But I wish to highlight the other side of this coin, and turn my thoughts to spring. This poem composed by a child reminds us that heaven is a place on earth. This life is precious, worth celebrating, even if we join the chorus with sadness, tears.
