Tag Archives: poem about faith

“Looking” for dVerse Poets, May 3, 2024

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     Click on photos to enlarge. 

                                                                       LOOKING

Every Sunday, sitting
on a small wooden chair
memorizing verses from a Bible with my name
stamped in golden letters on the cover,
singing “Jesus loves me, this I know,”
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Then in college, 
books and beer and Buddha,
that expanded religion of poetry
and midnight discussions in
the game room. Rumi, Roethke,
Donne and Philosophy 101.
Time after time,
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Moving once more into a wider
world with no hard chairs. Just
a backpack and the classroom of an open road,
putting things learned into practice,
that religion of experience, heady,
I found again, box after box, but didn’t fit inside.

For dVerse Poets this week, we were asked to compose ‘Bop’ poems.

The ‘Bop’ poetic form has 23 total lines in three stanzas ordered thus, with the same one line refrain following each of the three stanzas:

  1. a six-line stanza – that poses a problem;
  2. an eight-line stanza – that expands upon that problem;
  3. a six-line stanza – that solves, or fails to solve, the problem

For this prompt, we are to include the following line as the refrain after each of the three stanzas: I found a box and put a room inside
OR:
I found a box… [add your own words to complete the line]

Prompt guidelines:
No mandatory rhyme or meter;
Experiment with enjambment;
Use minimalistic grammar

Tree of Faith, for the Poetree Prompt

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For the new 2 writing  Poetree Prompt
If you can’t read the poem above, here it is in larger form:

Tree of Faith

In
another ­­
country,
I could be beheaded
for what I most believe in.
Personal. Unique.­
A creative faith that rules my life––­­
religion an organic thing
grown from a communication
between my heart and mind to shade me.

No pews or choir lofts.
No creeds or ayatollahs or muezzins.
No pentecostal dunkings
or annointments
other than fresh falling rain.
No prayer stick more holy than a paintbrush.
No well-thumbed hymnal
declaring faith more clearly than my fingers on a keyboard
or my gooey glue pot or a frame filled with my art and thus my soul.
If God is the creator,
then what prayer could be more elemental
than one’s own creation,
reading like a holy book of who you are?
Where is that creation drawn from
other than that first creator of it all?
We are still in the process of being created.
Genesis not a book already written but the very lives we live.
Yet in another country, this most elemental mysticism of the self–
stated, is punishable by death.
Hide not your flame under a bushel unless it is necessary,
oh brother poet, sister artist, fellow fanner of a personal flame.
You have been branded in your country by that fire
that should cure.
In many countries, perhaps all,
there have come times when what is personal
must remain so for survival’s sake.
Yet what has seeded change is martyrs such as yourself,
facing 800 lashings, years in prison if fortunate,
crucifixion if you’ve drawn the short straw
picked for you by old men wanting never to be judged themselves.
In another country, this simple act of putting words like mine upon a page
enough to end a life for.
That old geriatric communal faith
being so fragile that letting one person have their own faith
might bring about
that
first
seed
of its
shadow.

Faith, Fame and Family

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(I think I have a bit more faith than is demonstrated in this poem. What enters us to write through us is more an exploratory being than one completely sure of what we write. I do believe, however, that more evil has been done in this world by those absolutely sure of the rightness of their faith and their beliefs than by those who continue to explore, and the older I get, the more I realize that although part of a larger world and universe, we are all unavoidably alone in our existence.)

The prompt words today are solitary/solitude, alive, ephemeral and inspire.

 

An Agnostic’s (Creed?) Query

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An Agnostic’s Creed Query

Who knows, in the end,
what will be good fortune, what folly?
We make our choices, take our chances,
drawing straws that synchronicity turns long
or misfortune cuts in two.
One person’s good luck
is another’s ruin—
life, perhaps, being the biggest lottery
while the lord of games sits above
in his windowed cage, viewing the results
of his design. The wheel? Blind luck,
but part of some larger mechanism
rigged to keep the house functioning
for purposes that the faithful, those addicted to the game,
repeat like a litany, still pulling the slot handle, sorting the cards,
assuring themselves, over and over,
that they are taken into account.

 

 

The prompt today was “folly.”