God’s mother tongue

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also National Earth Month, Math Awareness Month, and Stress Awareness Month. As someone who lives on Earth, routinely helps her second grader with his math, and is acutely aware of the ongoing stress of both of those realities, I’m glad I have poetry to take the edge off. 

I’ve been writing poetry since before I could spell, but only recently have I worked up the nerve to call myself a poet. The claim “I write poetry” is a rented room with a back door that I can slip out of if something goes bump in the night. But to say “I am a poet”? That’s a house where the mortgage is in my name. Much more is expected of me there.

In her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston’s hyper-fictionalized caricature of biblical Moses, says this when chastised for not wanting to be crowned a king: “It’s not the title I am afraid of, it’s the thing itself…titles ain’t nothing but nicknames.”

I agree, fake Moses. It’s not the title (“poet”) that scares me, it’s the thing itself. The soul-siphoning work of whittling words into poems. A Frankensteinish practice, really. The creation of a living thing that is free to exist without me. I think of Ralph Emerson’s quote, “Cut these words and they would bleed, they are vascular and alive.”

Poems bleed. They bleed rhythm, and rhyme, and mood. Poems bleed irony, and image, and allusion. They bleed symbol and synecdoche.

But the marrow of a poem is metaphor. Without metaphor, a poem is dead on arrival. And this is true not just for poetry but for all of life. If we cannot find meaning beyond the things our physical senses can perceive, have we truly perceived them?

Nothing is meaningful in and of itself. Everything has a “more-to-it-ness”. It has to point to something else, something bigger than itself, to fulfill its created purpose. To understand metaphor is to see things so clearly that you peer right through them to the deeper things they’re trying to show us. 

The world is the world, until “all the world’s a stage…” (Shakespeare). A stair is a stair, until it “life ain’t been no crystal stair…” (Langston Hughes). A bank is a bank, until “the bank of justice is bankrupt” (MLK). A vine is a vine, until Jesus is “the True Vine, and you are the branches” (John 15:5).

Metaphor is the foundation of meaning. Everything we understand finds its full expression as metaphor. Metaphors are a wildly unendangered species. You can’t turn your head without one (or a dozen) being in your line of sight. To ignore their existence would be to dullen your own.

This is why the work of poetry feels like play. To be a poet is a life lived in the sandbox. Kids don’t run around calling themselves castle-makers. They don’t need the title. They just get down there in the sand and make castles. Sometimes it rains and everything is mud. But we keep playing, because the castles are calling us. And because the sandbox is a sanctuary. Holy ground. A place to encounter God himself. At least that’s what it has been for me. I tend to more easily find him in a turn of phrase than in nature or music or art.

God speaks metaphor. It is his mother tongue. And if we are going to understand him, his story, and our own, we must be fluent his language. One third of the Bible is poetry, and 59 of its 66 books include intentional poetic verse. God is a Poet, capital P. 

Every story, every word in the Scriptures means what it says literally, and says what it means metaphorically. This concept takes nothing away from the historicity of biblical events, it just recognizes that their meaning is both literal and literary. The more we understand metaphor, the more “vascular and alive” God’s words will be to us. The more they will bleed.

French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “If you begin by believing in metaphor, you will end by believing in God.” I think it’s true, and reversible. If you begin by believing in God, you will end by believing in metaphor. How could you not?

Everything we experience demands our interpretation and our imagination. A poet is just someone who interprets and imagines in ways that seem newly discovered. Poets use words to dig into matter and emotion to unearth familiar fossils. Deep, ancient truths we knew were there all along, but suddenly we’ve reached them and touched them, and they us. 

This simple line from a poem I’ve been playing with is the kind of familiar fossil that makes the muddy sandbox worth it:

I am more poem than poet.

This is the deep, ancient truth about me. About all of us. This is the tension between the title and the thing itself. Before we create, we must first identify with the reality of our having been created. Before we work, we must first yield to the fact that we are being worked on. 

More than I am a poet, I am a poem. I am the work. The sand. The fragile mud castle. The Frankensteiny thing, created by and for God, but free to exist without him if I so choose. 

This idea is inspired by the Greek word poiēma which is usually translated as “masterpiece” or “workmanship” in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.”

For we are God’s masterpiece (poiēma). He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.“ -Ephesians‬ ‭2‬:‭10‬ ‭NLT‬‬

We are pieces of the Master. Written by the quintessential Writer. Made by the great Metaphorist. 

For years I’ve been overcomplicating it. Pinballing between “I write poetry” and “I am a poet”, when neither holds the key to my creative freedom or identity. 

I am more poem than poetry. More written than writer. More story than author. I am free to simultaneously carry and cast off the weight of the title (“poet”) because I am the thing itself.