The Conversion of the Imagination

Sometimes poetry has the ability to rip us out of the status quo, to shake up our imaginations, in order that we may re-vision life, and come to understand just what it means to be new creations in Christ. Too often in this period of late-capitalism we become the consumers of images, images that become to us idolatrous, we need to be shaken to the core, to be re-invented, re-created, so that we can see the world as it was meant to be seen. In this vein I offer a poem by Yasmin Finch, 'in the beginning...', I suggest reading it out loud, again, again, and again.

in the beginning...

In the beginning was the word, and the word whispered.
Into our souls, into our spirits.
It whispered to the world,
to the babies born to African women
and the old men who sit at bus shelters in south America.
To the children who run barefoot through the Indonesian jungle
And the ones snuggled up in furs, pulled on sledges, through the Greenland winter.

The word whispered at the morning of the world,
when the first thin streaks of dawn stretched across the sky.
And it will be there at it's dying,by her bedside, mopping her brow, tending her needs.
The word whispered.
And through the darkness the light peeked out.
The word whispered and life coursed through the veins of every living thing.
The word whispered and most of us missed it.
It was gone, carried away by the wind, drowned by the sea, lost in the earth.

But those who heard it, those who felt its tug,
listened to the whisper.
Softly it spoke through all that is,
telling secrets,
speaking mysteries unknown
giggling at the colours of the sky
and grieving at the tears of the world.

In the beginning was the word, and the word whispered.

-Yasmin Finch