Recent years have seen a lot of firsts for me, publishing my first short story followed quickly by several others, including in subgenres ranging from flash fiction through to novelette. Now I’ve had my first poem published, assuming that posting them on my blog doesn’t count (nor anything that appeared in an elementary school creation). I have dabbled in poetry from time to time, and of course have written song lyrics, but it was the theme proposed for Volume 6 of Jesus The Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution that led me to write and submit this. That theme is Flesh and Spirit. Those words play an important role throughout the New Testament and in Christian theology down the ages, including in texts that I have studied academically and at the same time wrestled with personally and spiritually. My poem appears on pp. 54-55 of the volume, published by Angelico Press. I am including the text of the poem below. You can read the introduction to the volume by its editor Michael Martin hereread the introduction to the volume by its editor Michael Martin here.
Beholding Glory
Within, through, beyond your fleshly form
We glimpsed something
Encounter with the divine
We yearned for more
Fixated, we elaborated
Wrapped you in doctrines like linen sheets
Until your flesh and blood blurred and shimmered
We hewed a tomb of dogmaHarder than the toughest stone
Our words at once mausoleum and idol
Hiding your physical form away
We cut off from ourselves
the lifeblood that flowed through you
to quench our thirst
and give life to our branches
Help us look again with fresh eyes
With flesh eyes
Realize we’ve no others with which to behold
any glimpse of glory we might perceive
Roll away the idol we have made
with which we sought to seal you in
Confining you to the past
the abstract
the comforting and comfortable
the mental
the celestial
safer for us, we imagined
though dead
Let your fleshly form walk forth
Meet us anew
By the shore of our first encounter
An unsatisfying yet delicious glimpse
Of sun-darkened skin
Rough from labor
A face ever familiar, yet ever strange –
Like any other human visage
An old friend met again
In the warmth of hot coals
Over a breakfast of baked fish
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