Sculpting A Soul Poem by Mark Sauer

Not accretion, but paring away,
Is who we truly are;
The residue that remains on the last day -
Our essence is a scar.
We ripen by losing and forgetting.
Each choice lops off a limb.
Each act aborts a thousand begetting
Selves; Regret, not the sin,
Is eternal. All the paths not taken
Brought us precisely here;
Infinite potentials forsaken,
All merging to appear
Inevitable, reduced to one thread
In some vast tapestry,
One tessera in a mosaic spread
Across eternity.
If only I, like God, could see it led
To some deep-laid beauty.