A Prayer Poem for Our Grandchildren

I don’t pretend to be a poet. In fact, I’ve never set my pen to poetry before this venture. When our first grandson was born almost 9 years ago, I wrote the first verse. Now that we have three grandsons, I feel compelled to expand on it. And so, what follows is really a prayer but in the form of a poem.

The prayer poem begins and ends with the same verse creating a bookend effect. This is for two reasons: one because the repetition of the first and last verse is intended to be all-encompassing and surround the three verses in between and two, because the second, third, and fourth verses are unique, representing the uniqueness of each of our grandsons. I suppose the balance is a kind of feng shui. Maybe not. I don’t really know if this is correct to do in poetry. But by my lights, it does balance by ending where it began and provides a nice wrapper for the entire prayer poem. No particular verse is targeting a particular grandson; all verses could be applied to all our grandsons.

This is dedicated to them and for them because we love them dearly.

Soli Deo gloria!

Dear God,
Be with this child, be with his soul,
Make him Yours, fulfilled and whole.
And when he strays do bend his knee,
To seek Your face, his all in Thee.

 
Dear God,
Be for this child and give him life,
Abundant joy, without the strife.
Yet should he veer do guide his path,
To find his way back to a laugh.

 
Dear God,
Be near this child and in his thought,
And may he ne’er be distraught.
Though when he fears will he find,
Your Son our King, who’s always kind?

 
Dear God,
Be in this child and steer his dream,
So he may know his true esteem;
Is found in You and You alone,
The great I Am, Chief Cornerstone.

 
Dear God,
Be with this child, be with his soul.
Make him Yours, fulfilled and whole.
And when he strays do bend his knee,
To seek Your face, his all in Thee.

(Incidentally, although we do not have a granddaughter, the masculine pronouns referencing our grandsons “he/his” could easily be changed to feminine.)