Most of my newsletters to date have centered on the Bible and spiritual truths, but today I want to discuss poetry. As always, though, we will start with our anchor in Scripture, before heading out to sea, and finally setting sail with a poem.
Anchor
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. —Ephesians 2:10
Sea
When I conceived of Chasing After Wind, I envisioned interweaving Scripture and poetry, testimony and personal confession into something that could minister on multiple levels: to the body, soul, and spirit.
Poetry’s ability to do just that is why I first fell in love with language. A good poem about bread can make me salivate just as if I were smelling bread. A deft poem about pain can make me weep as if I were wounded myself, and precisely because I have eaten, I have smelled, I have ached, does the poem have power.
All humans are hardwired for language. It still baffles me that, through this evolved part of human cognition, we can touch the soul and receive revelation from the Holy One.
Grammar refers to the abstract mental organization of language in the brain that we use in everyday speech. The language that takes place in poetry (and prophecy) is something more. Like the genres of history and journalism, poetry and prophecy describe temporal facts. These facts could describe anything from the fall of Babylon to the exact quality of light on the water at dawn. However, each genre uses these facts for different ends. Poets and prophets use them not only to situate us in what is but to lay bare eternal truths. Prophecy stimulates the spirit. Poetry stimulates the soul. And so much of the Old Testament is poetry.
I don’t just mean it’s metaphorical; I mean literal poems: the book of Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, much of the Prophets. When the prophets recorded their “Thus-said-The-Lord’s”, they did so in poems.
This is why I firmly believe that reading poetry helps people appreciate and understand Scripture.
Reading poetry has helped me see that God’s Word shouldn’t be treated as a means to an end only. Like a good poem, God’s Word is meant to be savored, enjoyed, explored, inhaled. God’s Word, like God Himself, is rich, decadent, delicious, and intoxicating. God isn’t just useful or powerful; She is also beautiful. Poetry first cultivated that sensibility in me towards language. I now recognize it is also true of God.
When we deeply attend language, we pressurize grammar in such a way that we get something beyond mere communication. We get beauty. We get art, a way of allowing life’s meaning and depth to surface out of chaos and noise. (Sound at all like Genesis 1?)
Poetry is an embodied kind of language, language that doesn’t just describe but makes one experience the thing described. If you aren’t seeing the parallel to the Incarnation, it’s right there on the surface. Jesus is the Word, the embodied love of the Father that comes alive so that we can see, touch, and even smell it.
If Ephesians 2 is true and we are God’s workmanship (poiēma) created in Christ Jesus (the Incarnate Word) for good works, what exactly are the poems of our lives supposed to reveal?
Our lives are meant to reveal eternal truths about Christ and his coming Kingdom.
The Father edits our lives like a poem. He adds, layers, and rhymes. He voltas and he sonnets until finally the particularities of our stories come together to proclaim with unprecedented eloquence God’s wisdom and grace.
I’ll give a recent example.
Two weeks ago, I got to travel to the Netherlands to perform as part of Poetry International. PI is a festival that has been bringing poets from around the world to Rotterdam for the past 55 years. This year’s theme was “Laureates and Legends.” Since I’m not a laureate yet, I am one of the “legends.”
I had the opportunity to share space with Warsan Shire and poet laureates Simon Armitage (UK), Kwame Dawes (Jamaica), and Esther Phillips (Barbados). It was beautiful to listen to poems written in Ukrainian, Albanian, Dutch, and French.
Maltese-French poet Nadia Mifsud made Maltese sing, the Arabic and Italian vocabularies blending and troubling one another. It was like eating the perfect lemon tart: the chiffon and overly sweet Italian meringue perfectly balanced by the Arabic’s sharpness, a sensation you feel in your jaw and the back of your mouth.
Listening to Egyptian-Dutch poet Benzokarim break English’s closest cousin according to the sensibilities of Kaaps, a Colored South African dialect of Afrikaans, riveted me. He turned the language in ways I couldn’t understand but imagined I could, as if I was somehow sensing a memory of the language from millennia ago, when Dutch and English were the same.
I rarely get to engage all my sensibilities at once—poet, linguist, believer, lover— but at Poetry International, I got to be more myself at the same time and in one place. And this was a gift from God.
You see, for the last year and a half, I have been underemployed. Of course, I still write articles and perform on stages, but I haven’t had a consistent paycheck since I was let go from Scalawag Magazine. For the past two summers, I have traveled to the Netherlands to spend time with my boyfriend, a Dutch poet, artist, and creative director.
I’ve been trying to find work to do in the Netherlands that could help offset the expense of traveling back and forth overseas. But for two years in a row—nothing. I applied for jobs, pitched magazine articles, and tried to organize shows and workshops. Nothing.
Last summer, M and I broke up. I thought I would never go back to the Netherlands, never see him or the Lowlands again. But God has a funny way. In February of this year, I received an email from Poetry International asking if I would perform at their festival in Rotterdam in June, with all expenses paid and a $1000 honorarium.
M and I still weren’t back together yet, but I had to say yes to this opportunity. The check from Poetry International would double what I had made in six months.
I say this not because I am in need, but because God is able to meet all my needs, and quite efficiently, I might add.
He provided a way to earn some money, reunite with M, utilize my gifts, and fulfill my dream of performing on more international stages all at the same time. That’s a real poet at work who can do all that with such economy of movement. The truth of that is God provides. He is working it ALL together for my good.
God did what I could not do for myself. For that, He deserves my wonder and praise!
Over the course of a few days, I got to talk with Nadia about a paper I wrote in graduate school about Maltese. I got to hug Warsan. We’d been Twitter friends before either of us was a big name in poetry, but had never met in person. I got to make connections with poetry organizations in Poland, Barbados, and Italy. I got to go on scooter rides and long walks with my love. I got to talk about the difference between religion and Jesus with M’s good friends, whose opinions about God are as different as their ethnicities. And I got to be reminded of the power of my poems. That even when I’m not writing poetry consistently, I am still a poet made in the image of the One who spoke the world into being. I’m a metaphor for His meaning. He is the beauty of my story and the grammar holding it all together.
Verily,
Alysia
Recent + Upcoming Appearances: Catch me out and about!
New Interview on The Ethically Immoral Podcast
June 14, 2025 | Online
Upcoming Appearance: Listen Here Open Mic
July 10, 2025 | Corsicana, TX
Upcoming Workshop: Right 2 Write Festival
August 30, 2025 | Dallas, TX
Upcoming Performance: When Poets Pray
September 12, 2025 | Fort Worth, TX
Sail
Here is the video for one of my performances at Poetry International: “When I Look at You Without Speaking, I’m Drawing a Map.” Given the nationalistic fervor that is turning borders into thin red lines, exing and exiling whole peoples with the stroke of a pen, I picked poems that make every effort to bring people into the country of love from which no one can be cast out. My next newsletter will explore some of the spiritual themes present in this and other poems. Stay tuned.
Also coming soon, we will have a guest feature from my friend, sculptor Eóin Burke. Eóin and I conducted ministry out of his studio for artists and 20-somethings in New York back in 2012. But more on that later.
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