Suburbia burns silently
White candles burst in
Choreographed conflagration
Graceful limbs engulfed in
Fleeting crowns of pastel flame
Ablaze yet not consumed
Sophisticated minds swear blind
Such subtle orchestrations are but
Skittering showers of sparks
Accidentals struck loose by the
Wild, chaotic wheels of
Dogged chance
But is it so?
Are we determined by
Mechanical necessity
Some poverty of spirit to
Impute poetic grace sublime
Each painstaking design
To mute, unthinking fluke?
Or does He whose voice
In steady certitude
Called from in a burning bush
Speak yet in this quiet inferno
Blazing at the dawn of spring?
Do we yet stand on holy ground?
The featured image is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating and The Cultivating Project.
Sam is a poet, essayist, photographer, and songwriter, who explores the interspace between imagination and reason, faith and doubt, the physical and the transcendent. He’s inspired by the examples of G.K. Chesterton, Wendell Berry, and George Steiner: rare thinkers who chose to dwell in the painful yet fruitful tensions of these ‘in-between’ spaces.
Sam lives with his wife Colette and their two young daughters in the cathedral city of Winchester, UK. A recovering academic in the natural sciences, Sam now mixes science and semantics as a Patent Attorney; but by night, he returns to his first love of crafting sentences, stanzas and songs.
In addition to his column, poetry, and photography for Cultivating, Sam’s work has been published by The Gospel Coalition, Ekstasis, and in the poetry collection Cultivating the Sacred Ordinary (ed. Leslie Bustard & Amy Malskeit).
Add a comment
0 Comments