After Appollinaire
“Come back, come back from the edge,”
They cried.
And then he fell.
“Perhaps he was unhappy.”
“Perhaps all his life he was living a lie.”
“Perhaps he wasn’t right in the head.”
Or perhaps he knew that he could fly.
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5 comments:
Thanks for the poem. I was not aware of Appollinaire. Now I am. An interesting bit of history, though I don't read French.
I hope the poem doesn't indicate a morbid desire in you. If, by chance, it does, please contact me.
The poem calls up several thoughts:
--Where's the line between brilliance and insanity? (I think I've visited both sides.)
--To someone who knows little of the Lord, the Christian must seem like someone who can "fly" - sometimes soaring above hurts that might destroy others. (Not that Christians can't have real, huge, painful problems.)
--I once heard the path of obedience compared to a path with a cliff on one side and a broad meadow on the other. Some people veer off of the path into the meadow, because they're afraid of the cliff. The farther they go astray into the meadow, the closer those on the path look to the cliff. The people in the meadow think the people on the path are in danger of going off of the cliff at any moment. I believe the source of that comparison was Pastor Jack Hayford's late son-in-law Scott Bauer.
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Thanks for the comments, Jim. I came up with this poem after thinking about how other people view Christians, especially (in my case), people who knew us before we became Christians. They tend on the whole I think to view conversion with a slightly melancholy tinge. I mean, I imagine them thinking things like, "he's using religion as a crutch" or "he's turning to God because he can't deal with problems on his own" - whereas what I would want them to think is, "he's become a Christian because God's just fantastic!". But how to express this as a poem?
Then I came across the Apollinaire's "Come to the Edge", and I thought, what if I inverted that concept, what if the poem wasn't about people being afraid to "make the leap" (a leap of faith?), but doing it joyfully and willingly, and yet not quite being understood by those around them.
So I suppose it's a poem about a misunderstanding, or a lack of communication, between believer and non-believer. Sometimes I think non-Christians look at us and think, "well, yeah, Christianity seems to be working for him, but no-one's really explained how it might work for me." And that's where your story about the cliff and the meadow comes in. There's two different perspectives at work, and how do we go about bringing those perspectives back together again?
BunnyGirl was right! You are gifted! Do you allow people to reproduce any of your work on other personal sites (not to make money and of course, giving you full citation)?
feel free, Jon.
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