Now, often a tale is thought of as a make believe story. However, it can be simply a recitation of events. While the stories in this poem are tales, they are surely not tall tales. I hope you enjoy this missionary poem as much as I did. It has some beautiful love pictures.
Have You Heard of the Tale?
Have you heard the tale of the aloe plant,
Away in the sunny clime?
By humble growth of a hundred years
It reaches its blooming time;
And then a wondrous bud at its crown
Breaks into a thousand flowers;
This floral queen, in its blooming seen,
Is the pride of the tropical bowers,
But the plant to the flower is sacrifice,
For it blooms but once, and it dies.
Have you further heard of the aloe plant,
That grows in the sunny clime;
How everyone of its thousand flowers,
As they drop in the blooming time,
Is an infant plant that fastens its roots
In the place where it falls on the ground,
And as fast as they drop from the dying stem,
Grow lively and lovely around?
By dying, it liveth a thousand-fold
In the young that spring from the death of old.
Have you heard the tale of the pelican*,
The Arab’s Gimel of Bahr,
That lives in the African solitudes,
Where the birds that live lonely are?
Have you heard how it loves its tender young,
And cares and toils for their good,
It brings them water from mountain far,
And fishes the sea for their food.
In famine it feeds them – what love can devise!
The blood of its bosom – and feeding them, dies.
Have you heard this tale – the best of them all –
The tale of the Holy and True,
He dies, but His life, in untold souls
Lives on in the world anew;
His seed prevails, and is filling the earth,
As the stars fill the sky above,
He taught us to yield up the love of life,
For the sake of the life of love.
His death is our life, His loss is our gain;
The joy for the tear, the peace for the pain.
~Found on pp. 129,130 of Streams in the Desert, by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman
*See Psalm 102:6
Jesus Christ - "To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace." (Ephesians 1:6,7)