Perfect health is above gold; a sound body before riches. (Solomon)
What do you long for most of all?
A beautiful painting on your drawing room wall?
Exquisite jewels in a setting rare?
A graceful slender Chippendale chair?
Things of beauty are these to treasure?
Unless unkind fate may dim your pleasure,
If perfect health is not your lot
What value are these things you’ve got?
You’d exchange them all for the glow of health
You must surely agree this is greater than wealth.
Solomon, great wisdom gained with his many years,
Compounded truths in this vale of tears,
Perfect health, he said, is above gold.
And we question not this saying of old.
Down through the ages its truth is proved,
And though all our gold be from us removed
If perfect health is our companion today
This priceless gift we’ll not cast away.
A sound body is before riches, Solomon said
And though this wise man has long been dead
This truth endures, and always will
Through aches and pains may irk us still.
Accumulation of riches may give us a glow
But sound bodies are not purchased this way we know.
Bank accounts and palatial homes
Are not a cure for all aching bones.
A sound body is before riches
Ah! — how wise was he
Who passed on this wisdom, to such as we.
- Amy Eunice (Cruickshank) Jarvis, February 1952, taken from Amy - the folk poetry of Amy Cruickshank Jarvis
