HEAVEN HAS COME

I spent half of the time in church last Sunday silently fighting distraction. The lady seated in front of me donned a plush Afro. It wasn’t the hair that distracted me, it was the white speck in the lush black. There I was, my wife beside me, & a voice in my head telling me to reach for the particle. This urge for aesthetic perfection, or a semblance of it, is pure poetry—the lure of illicitness, the risk of disruption…

Two days in a row, in church, the same question was posed to me by two different persons—what’s the essence of poetry? I could tell by their facial expressions that my responses were not satisfactory. I probably left them more baffled & more disinterested. But how do you explain a spiritual thing? You need to encounter it—personally.

This morning, ears plugged into TY Bello’s latest album, I found the perfect metaphor for poetry. Beyond her piercing vocals & meditative melodies, her lyrical adeptness moves me every single time. Poetry, to me, is like TY’s music—sparse verses, soft strings, deft drums & hypnotic rhythm. Exploiting figurative language, bold lyrics float over an unintrusive background of chords & percussions, easing the listener into a realm of deep worship.

During a discussion with Nora, my first daughter, she made use of a particular new word in her expression. I was smiling to myself, admiring how her vocabulary was expanding when she turned to me & asked what that particular word meant. I broke into an even bigger smile. But this is how I write too—words fall like divine rain into my mental reservoir. This is why I insist that a poem is an encounter, a transcendental expedition into a dark universe of knowing. Each line is a miracle.

It is like sex with a lover—each time, the experience is different. Sacred. Takes you to the fringes of screams & tears. To say something is spiritual is to say that it is participatory. Like worship. Like bringing heaven down to earth!