Abraham's Altar

I would like to give you part of a longer poem that I started working on some time ago. I made progress quickly at first, but have stalled now, unsatisfied but not knowing how to get from where I am to where I want to be. There's a lot to be said about this particular story, and I want to cover it all, but without running on forever.

Here's what I have written so far (the readable parts), with a warning that much of this may end up deleted:

*The first line of each verse completes the last one from the verse before. I indent them, but blogger won't let me do it here.*

On Abraham’s altar he laid
the weight of years, and tears that stayed
in his wife’s yearning heart while yet
she knew he loved her, and set
his mind to accept the servant
as his heir.

There the fervent
hope of God’s promise, their prayer,
and the sands of the lands that their
journey had traversed lay prostrate
in the body of a boy. Late
he had waited, watched the stars, seen
in them all his children between
then and eternity. They too
waited for their death. So he drew
his dagger to slay the laughter
of their old age, nor could, after,
Isaac say he wavered.

This man
by God’s call had gone in the span
of frail life from pagan Ur
to here—and though he was unsure
so often, though he doubted God,
and gave up his wife from fear, prod
the Divinity by taking
the slave girl, and made an aching
wound that history’s not yet healed—
His justification was revealed
at this hour, at Abraham’s grim
test, before the angel stayed him,
when all his heart’s desire lay still
and bound before him, and his will
strained against his heart.

Abraham
believed. Nor did he need the ram
to understand that just one birth
was enough—that this child of mirth
would live, and death alone could not
kill the promise of He who brought
him here; he begged not mercies such
as he begged for Sodom’s children.
Could Sarah’s womb be more barren
that it already was?

And so,
in faith, he bound his son, and no
sooner did he take up the blade,
then God in graciousness stayed
him.