Regained: A Poem

Light

Not overcome

Good gifts taken

Naked – unashamed they were

Could it ever be regained?

Stripped, bearing shame vicariously

Holy wrath extinguished

Father’s love

New

           New

© Jason Goroncy, 2008

5 comments

  1. As reluctant as I am to discuss my poems, I felt so too. The regaining must be teleological. I wanted to reflect this. That said, I think I preferred it as a chiasm as well and have been considering returning it back to its original form. Oh, the big choices I have to make.

    Unfortunately, I’m a very amateurish poet.

    Ummmmmmmmmmmm.

    Like

  2. Ah, now you break the chiasm with the second ‘new’. Nice – recapitulation but also grace abounding and taking us somewhere new and better than creation.

    Like

  3. Byron. Glad you like the upgrade. I think I’m the most happy with it I’ve been.

    Discussing why I am reluctant to discuss my poems? Sure. I’m happy to do that.

    Perhaps we could both read Geoffrey Bingham’s ‘Introduction: The Reading of Poetry’ in his collection of poems: The Spirit of All Things as a starting point. You can download the book here: http://www.newcreation.org.au/books/pdf/332_SpiritAllThings.pdf

    Happy with other suggestions too. Basically, I enjoy reading and writing poetry (indeed, I sometimes feel that some poems – perhaps the best – basically write themselves) but am acutely aware that I do both poorly. In my post-PhD life I plan to attend to this deficiency. The fact is that I know so little about what makes a poem ‘good’. I am always, however, keen to learn more about poetry, and that not least because the best theology is often poetic, and the best poetry the most theological. I have tried to express my thoughts about this in an article on Art, Tragedy and Sacramentaility. Available here: http://www.princetontheologicalreview.org/issues_web/36_text.html#article6

    My other reluctance about discussing poetry is that sometimes in the chase to ‘understand’ (to ‘get’), the magic of the poem itself is lost. Perhaps this is a risk worth taking, as with good poems (at least) there is always as-yet-uncovered magic to discover.

    Like

Comments welcome here

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.