Fireworks

Spring lit the wick
        and the flame crawled
        up! and up!
The fireworks blew up quick
        I could almost hear the
        pop! pop!

They exploded in yellow,
        purple, orange, pink,
        white, blue, and
        red! so red!

nature’s fireworks flared. Mellow,
        longer-lived,
        sweet-smelling—
        and instead of burned paper,
                        the product was berries overhead

Snow

Snow,
like grace,
falls from heaven

and covers the sin-scarred world
like a blanket of righteousness.


But soon it melts
to black sludge

Because men,
like fish,
wear a layer of slime.

Milton's Fiery Language

...Instead of Fruit Chew’d Bitter Ashes, Which th’Offended Taste with Spattering Noise Rejected...

John Milton may have had bad eyes, but his tongue and ears displayed masterful skill. The flames of his passionate language still leap from the page more than three hundred years later, as in this passage from Paradise Lost about how God tormented the demons as they tried to applaud after Satan bragged to them about his success in tempting man (Book X, lines 545-562) :

...Thus was th’applause they meant,

Turn’d to exploding hiss, triumph to shame

Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood

A Grove hard by, sprung up with this their change,

His will who reigns above, to aggravate

Their penance, laden with fair Fruit, like that

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve

Us’d by the Tempter: on that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes they fix’d, imagining

For one forbidden Tree a multitude

Now ris’s, to work them further woe or shame;

Yet parcht with scalding thirst and hunger fierce,

Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,

But on they roll’d in heaps, and up the Trees

Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks

That curl’d Megaera: greedily they pluck’d

The Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew

Near the bituminous Lake where Sodom flam’d....

Had I written this, no one would bother to read it:

They meant to applaud, but instead, they hissed very loudly! They had been feeling triumphant, but now they felt embarrassed, because the hissing had come from their own mouths.

There was a grove nearby, which grew up when they changed into snakes...

Unlike mine, Milton’s language is concise. The way he phrased his sentences allowed him to say a lot with few words. He rarely used more than one adjective or adverb per word, often opting to let the word fend for itself. Consequently, his verse is strong, like lemon juice concentrate.

The few words he did use are robust with energy. They are strong enough to carry the weight of the epic without assistance. He choose “stood” over “was,” “sprung up” rather than “grown up”; even “hard by” instead of dull-sounding “nearby.”

Milton was a painter. With a small number of strokes, he could conjure up entire scenes full of sensory detail. The reader can’t help but envision the fabulous events Milton describes in concrete detail. Instead of saying, “laden with fair fruit like the fruit of the Tree of Life,” Milton packed in a verb, a strong noun, and a haunting phrase, “the bait of Eve”—as if Eve were an animal baited by a demon hunter. Instead of saying simply, “the Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew near Sodom,” he includes a grimy lake; moreover, Sodom doesn’t sit vague and dull—it burns. Milton rendered this clause so successfully that he created an aura of Hell, without explicitly reminding us where the scene in question was taking place.

Writing was the art that allowed this blind man to paint brilliant scenes, which like the picture of the Dawntreader in CS Lewis’ book, start to move when one looks at them, and are likely to swallow one up into the extraordinary story they comprise.

A Professor No More, The Professor Yet

They were building a new building. As they had built the last,
They had often seen him give a—well, a look as he passed.

The principal of the college thought building much fun—
Until the professor asked quietly, “Hmm. Another one?”

The principal caught his breath, knowing what was meant. “You cannot pass!
By the secret flames, if you go now, who will teach next week’s class?”

With a kind smile, the reply: “Your buildings. But I won’t stay.”
And lifting off his professor’s hat, he threw it a very long way.

The principal tried to block the professor’s perilous path,
but the gentle professor quickly gave him some math.

Then slowly and silently walked to the wall.
The other looked up and croaked out a call

but the professor went over. It was not the glass on top
that made the principal, distrot, whisper, “Please stop.”

They hired trackers who sought him with hounds,
but the clever old professor was not to be found.

The principal rushed to the prof’s house and banged on the door.
A little girl answered, with a sweet, “What’s the pounding for?”

Unused to being spoken to so, he flushed thuroly red.
The shame cut so deep he then would have fled,

but she said softly, “If you are looking for my grandpa, he is here.”
He was aghast at his own odious response, which was: “Oh dear.”

The prof was in the kitchen, sleeping on (what the girl called) the picnic table.
The principal tried to say “Hi.” Instead came, “Um, Mr. Mentally Unstable—”

“That’s so; I never have kept horses in my brain.
The weight is likely to cause a good deal of pain.

“One day an obnoxious reduced my granddaughter to tears,
so I stuffed equines into his head till he bled thru his ears.”

Involuntarily the principal offered, “Is that story true?”
Not even looking. The girl said, “He made it for you.”

Again accidentally—“Hey, you can’t scare me, dude.”
“What?”—a hint of surprised anger. “Were you rude?”

Still looking away, the prof wrote, “Granted: permission to go out.”
Mission forgotten, the principal ran, barely swallowing a startled shout.

He consoled himself: “He’ll be back; he must turn a resignation in.”
But that was that. The professor never set foot on the campus again.

The Dying Grandfather

Like a man who smells a storm
he could feel the breath of death’s yawning gullet—
a wind like a blade of ice that slashed through his dirty jacket
and left him coughing up blood and clinging to his daughter-in-law,
withering and rotting like a fig,
softening and crumbling like a fallen aspen,
his cloudy eyes and loose face
showing a despair too strong to brave,
and a man too weak to scream.

America—The Hope of the World?

Partway through a paragraph, I stopped reading. My mind had hung up on a gripping phrase several sentences earlier. I backtracked and reread the sentence: “History textbooks go even further to imply that simply by participation in society, Americans contribute to a nation that is constantly progressing, and remains the hope of the world.” (Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 257-258) There wasn’t anything exceptional about the first part of the sentence, but the last bit grabbed my attention—“a nation that is...the hope of the world.” The phrase echoed and reechoed in my head. “The hope of the world.”

Is Loewen right? I wondered. Does America consider herself the hope of the world? Maybe the reason that this statement struck me so hard was that it hit home. It had an eerie ring of truth though I had never heard anyone say anything like it before. I realized that I often did think of America this way, subconsciously supposing that she could cure any kind of problem: Are you persecuted in your home country? Immigrate to the Statues! Are you poor? Wealth is to be found in the US! Is someone somewhere in the world in trouble? Don’t worry. America will come to his aid.

America is a privileged country, so sometimes poor and persecuted people do immigrate and find wealth and release from persecution. But only a small percentage of the people in the world can immigrate to America. America cannot rescue every hurting person in the world. In fact, she cannot rescue even one. Making someone wealthy might make them comfortable for a few decades, but in light of eternity that is negligible. The same can be said for release from persecution. America may be able to give some measure of temporal relief from suffering, but can she do anything to ensure that this will have any kind of permanence?

No, of course not—only Jesus can do that. This is the strength of Loewen’s phrase “the hope of the world”—for a Christian, it should immediately bring Jesus to mind. Jesus is the only hope in a dying world. He can give the eternal life that America cannot offer. If we think of America as the hope of the world, we are breaking the First Commandment by “having something else before” Him.

God chastised the Israelites for trusting in Egypt (Is 30:1-7). To put our hope in America is as foolish now as putting one’s hope in Egypt was back then. America will never save anyone. When I think of America as the hope of the world, I am showing my preoccupation with the things that America has to offer—only things of this world. I need to remember that the greatest nation on earth is nothing to God, and only Jesus can save anyone in the eternal sense of the word.

In Praise of Lunacy

The professor is old—how old nobody knows.
It is believed that his beard caresses his toes.

The class was impatient—“Why should we wait?”
For as was his custom, the old professor was late.

When he finally came in, at least a half hour over,
he explained he had stopped to sniff at the clover.

“How do we know you won’t come when you should?”
His simple reply was—“The clovers smelled good.”

Yet they persisted, “Now will you give us a lecture?”
“That,” he said slowly, “is no more than conjecture.”

“Today,” he continued, “I will instruct you on how to be crazy,
for the insane are most often hardworking and never at all lazy.

I know many lunatics who are good and kind,
‘cause the right way to be is out of your mind.

For madmen are generally of very good cheer;
I myself have been mad now for many a year.

Simply scream out if you have any questions,
for I am quite open to all kinds of suggestions.”

“Well,” shrieked one, “what of two plus two?
With your lunacy method, what do you do?”

“If you do not know that one,” his teacher kindly intoned,
“I don’t know how you got here.” The students all moaned.

“Professor, what would you do if there was a war
and an enemy soldier came through at your door?”

“Now that is a real question,” the old man said.
“Perhaps I would ask him to stand on his head.”

“Do you skin a beaver from the bottom or top?”
“My personal preference is a sharp lollipop.”

Oh, how they mocked, how they all laughed and jeered;
the professor’s only response was to play with his beard.

They called him names; they shouted out, “Fake!”
The professor did not hear. He was eating his cake.