Last week I wrote this blog post for the Association of Christian Writers’ blog, More Than Writers.  It finishes with a poem called Katalambano (click above and have a look at the blog post to find out more about what that means!)

The poem is one of a pair, but I wrote them years apart.  The first one is called Source, and was written at Spring Harvest 2013 as a creative meditation on the first few verses of John 1, that Bible passage often heard at Christmas and also known as the Prologue.  When I wrote Katalambano in October 2015, I wasn’t setting out to write a companion piece, but it was immediately obvious that the finished poem belonged with Source: in the same rhythm, based on the same passage, and both written from a simple list of words in my journal.

Here they are together.

Source

He is the Source, the Beginning, the Maker,
The Origin, Big Bang, Primeval Earthquaker,
The Author, Composer, the Dreamer, the Dream,
Foundation, the Cornerstone, Load-Bearing Beam,
Creator, Inspiring, he sang the first song,
Alpha, Word, Logos, the There-All-Along
The initial brush stroke on the page waiting white,
The Crux and the Reason Why, Let There Be Light
Firstborn from the dead, he’s the one up before us
The Number One, Rising Sun, leads the dawn chorus
The breath before speaking, the thought before breath,
The spark before thinking, the Life without death.

Katalambano

When light shines in darkness, the darkness is gone.
In darkness, light cannot be swallowed or won,
Contained or attained, or explained, grasped or gained,
Seized or perceived, acquired or obtained.
The dark doesn’t get it.
The dark hasn’t found it.
The dark cannot wrap understanding around it,
For darkness cannot comprehend light, or know it,
Cannot overwhelm, overcome, overthrow it;
The dark has not conquered or crushed or controlled it
The dark doesn’t get it.
The dark cannot hold it.
In Jesus was life, and the life was the light, because
He held life – lightly –
So that we’d hold it tight.