During the past couple months I've posted five poems, each with the title "a story of creation." Below is a brief explanation and defense of my work.
The five poems I constructed function at a number of levels. Most straightforwardly, each poem, I hope, stands on its own as a piece of work. I tried to write each poem in such a way that someone who does not see the other four, can still understand and appreciate the message of the individual poem – and hopefully its presentation is artistic. Toward that end, I wrote each poem with intention of clearly communicating its topic.
Concerning the topics of the poems, I have written five poems, and if I succeeded, the poems together also make up a single work. I tried to write a series of poems about creation, fall and redemption, and further, I attempted a chiastic structure. So poems “A1” and “A2” both speak of God’s creative acts, the first about nature and the second about God’s creating man in his image. Poems “B1” and “B2” speak of the fall of earth and sin’s consequences for human kind, respectively. And then for “C,” the center of the chiasm,[1] I placed a poem about Christ. Diagrammatically, my poem(s) follow(s) this structure:
A1(creation of nature)
B1(fall of nature)
C (Christ)
B2 (fall of man)
A1(creation of man)
My framing set of poems (“A”) each follows the same structure of three lines followed by four lines. The two poems together communicate God’s creating act as both beautiful and as a gift from a gracious God. At a different, yet perhaps more important, level, the two “A” poems function as the beginning of a sort of chronological and even left-to-right arrow, buried within my chiastic structure; quite obviously, creation is the beginning of all things, and specifically, God’s meta-narrative.
The two “B” poems each laments the fall of creation due to sin, the fall of the natural order and humanity, respectively. And so, together these poems function as a lament of the fall as a unit. Each poem is only four lines long. I intentionally wrote these as shorter pieces, symbolic of sin’s brief career (from a cosmic perspective). Also just as the first set, the two poems about sin focus the chronological arrow pointing toward Christ further – fall followed creation.
Finally, the center poem of my series celebrates Christ. Symbolically longer than the other poems, alluding to Christ’s lasting reign as King of creation, this poem plays with the upside-down relationship between Adam and Christ. Adam sought life, but brought death; Christ sought death, but bought life (Rom 5). Although in a linear sense, the “C” poem sits in the middle of my collection (rightly so in a chiasm), when the poem takes an arrow shape (chiasm), the Christ poems takes its place as the final and concluding poem in a chronologically directional sense. Creation and fall point to Christ; Christ brings resolution to creation’s fall. Of course, there are many different ways placing Christ as the center can allude to other things: Christ is the focal point of good theology, Christ is the peak of the Bible’s narrative, people are called to center their lives on Christ, etc. The list could continue.
In summation, I hope each of my five poems communicates lament and celebration of creation, creation’s fall and creation’s savior. I also hope as a unit, the poems tell the story of the world’s existence and its restoration in Christ’s reversing Adam’s sin.
[1] I am calling this series a chiasm, but usually chiasms are contained in a single piece of work. So in a sense, I deviated from traditional uses of the chiastic structure. But in another sense, I consider my five poems as a single work.
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