From Alan~ please send in some original poems to share; I have a couple of new contributors lined up but it will take a week or two to organise….. send poems to:
alankeycol@btinternet.com
Meanwhile ….
Our faith is not irrational, but at the same time goes beyond reason. But we live in a world where we like to understand and to grasp everything, and we may be less happy with the uncertain, the slippery world of symbol and metaphor. I have grown to appreciate icons, because they convey to us a reality which is not everyday, but from an eternal perspective. ( By that I mean that the subject is portrayed with a sense of the meaning of their existence – and the gift it brings to us - rather than in a photographic kind of way. )
Similarly, I like poems - many of them - because they are given in sentences which are not
all straightforward and “tied up”; there is work for us to do, reading, reflecting, and feeling whether we resonate with the spirit or idea of the poem. I’ve tried to sum this up in this poem :
Poem and icon …
A poem is like an icon;
inexplicit,
requiring delving,
repeated visits,
absence and fresh encounter.
An icon is like a poem,
inexplicit,
requiring delving,
repeated visits,
absence and fresh encounter.
Word and vision taunt us with incompleteness,
The complete is lacking in all subtlety
Yet the incomplete requires courage
to journey to a land unknown;.
Such journeying is to the land of promise,
dreamt of, longed for, but always ahead of us.
Alan
To illustrate what I mean by the elusive, symbolic nature of an icon, see :
