I haven't written a poem in a long time. I've started on a few but cannot seem to finish them. Perhaps reading great poetry has exposed my poetic inadequacies and I am caught in a fear of failure - a sickening mental paralysis. The past week was tough, but when I really left my house for the first time in a week yesterday, I saw (what I think are) tulips growing on the outside of the wall. I've never really been one who appreciates flowers, but they caught my eyes - bright yellow and red. And I remembered another tulip, rather TULIP and slowly I found words.
2 Corinthians 4: 1-6 has been one of the most significant passages that taught me what grace looks like, and how one should respond to it. Here's verse 6 (perhaps my favourite Bible verse) before you read the poem: 'For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.'
Out of the mire of despair,
The Lord has lifted me.
He, whose image I had impaired,
Has heard my hopeless plea.
Far from my flashes of
constancy,
The Lord, His word has kept.
Convulsed in rebellious ecstasy,
This being is sunk in debt
To unrighteous consistency -
The payment – yet – strangely
met.
For the Curse was pronounced its
doom
In tomes of ancient time;
A man would bear weak Adam’s doom,
A swap for humankind.
Then into the midnight of my
soul,
My Lord has shone his light;
Evinced in wounds whence a crimson
flow
Surely cured sin’s deadly blight.
