‘Poetry’ Category

Control: humanity’s default mode.

Essential to our being

And imaging God.

©Michael A.G. Haykin, 2010.

Mr. Passionate-for-spirit

Tells me of his disordered ardour

For gorging and quaffing

Prayer and image and holy place

—A true gourmand this.

“God has no religion,”

He loudly quips,

Summing up his travels.

But here is no real seeking—

Simply sheer glitter and vaunt;

For only coldness does he feel

For the Refiner’s Way

Refulgent from crux to Glory—

And at the end

God’s ardent order that before

Jesus all fall on bended knee.

©Michael A.G. Haykin 2009.

Finitude
With confining hues
Paints us in a corner.

But was it not
The angle of Geneva
That coloured a hemisphere?

Michael A.G. Haykin©2009.

For some, Christmas is
The toughest time—
Where joy should be,
Only sadness and weeping.

Is that why
The infants dying at Bethlehem
And Simeon’s prophecy
Of a dagger through the heart?

And now all who call Jesus Lord
Should know the cost:
There are tears—gut-wrenching groans—
Before that joyous trump shall sound.

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.

My love for poetry grows as I grow older, for there are some things about this world that can only be expressed in poetic form.

Recently I came across another fabulous line in T.S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker”, which is part of my favourite work of his, The Four Quartets: “Old men ought to be explorers.”

How true!

It is noteworthy that when Andrew Fuller was deeply moved, he would recite out loud lines of poetry that expressed the deep emotions he was feeling.

Poetry, though, has largely fallen out of favour with many Christian thinkers and theologians since then. This is a real shame. There are some things that poetry can better express than theological discourse.

Like so much of life, there is a giftedness to poetry. To be sure, there is toil involved—the testing of word and rhythm—but, in the final analysis, a poem is a gift. What is there, that we have not received.

Epiphanies happen.
Where roads cross and
Speech, passing through frail,
Though coal-fired, lip
Compresses an open heart,
Once iron, but now wrought
With textures elastic and fine.

There:
The Visible is seen,
A Voice is heeded,
And Joy is given.

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.

Our faces—by pixel spread,
For a globe to gaze—
This, standard fare for
A techno-crafty day:
Yet, a tornado strike
Or turbulent snow
Would render such
Fading and illusory.

And whence our persons then?
And what glory in all of this?
It’s all so docetic!

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.

How fragile urban steel and stone
The fabrics that shore up city and clan
If water, essence of all wealth, dry up:
If these reservoirs of liquid
Turn to moisture and air
Or be spilled to soak into earthen soil—
Where then our civic strength and pride?

But O! what greater loss if soul
Be of supernal Sea deprived,
If heaven’s clouds pass by
Without drop or shower—
O! for thunder and the light,
The storm and those drenching rains
Pantycelyn and Griffiths knew,
And that kept them thirsting for more.

Michael A.G. Haykin©2008.