The sailing of the ark

wordsout by godfrey rust
Collections of poems and readings

The sailing of the ark

A sequence of 45 loosely-formed sonnets about the meaning of Christian faith in postmodernity
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Sonnet 1 "Andrew, another year has stripped..."

Sonnet 2 "We've reached life's middle ground..."

Sonnet 3 "Balding, overweight, at night I plod..."

Sonnet 4 "It's a numbers game."

Sonnet 5 "At thirty-five thousand feet,"

Sonnet 6 "Some of our friends who came so..."

Sonnet 7 "The wind roared unannounced..."

Sonnet 8 "The siren voices of false certainty..."

Sonnet 9 "So much that at one time..."

Sonnet 10 "You're writing about marriage —"

Sonnet 11 "The world is spoiled and cannot be..."

Sonnet 12 "What little I know of scientific method..."

Sonnet 13 "The ark sailed sometime in the 1980s."

Sonnet 14 "Here is the plain good news —"

Sonnet 15 "And still there is the old familiar puzzle:"

Sonnet 16 "Nearly two hundred million years ago..."

Sonnet 17 "We must return to sources,"

Sonnet 18 "It would be hard to get the New Testament..."

Sonnet 19 "The Jews I think say there are ..."

Sonnet 20 "God had the choice of technologies."

Sonnet 21 "Who sanctions this search..."

Sonnet 22 "Imagine one more myth."

Sonnet 23 "We do not find God by theology..."

Sonnet 24 "That he should choose obscurity..."

Sonnet 25 "The history of Israel is a black cloak..."

Sonnet 26 "From his first word..."

Sonnet 27 "Finally it seemed God had given them up..."

Sonnet 28 "The word said 'Become like this...'"

Sonnet 29 "The word was squeezed out..."

Sonnet 30 "'Fear not' the herald said —"

Sonnet 31 "The ark sailed backwards..."

Sonnet 32 "This was no rehearsal."

Sonnet 33 "The Bible says Jesus loved Lazarus..."

Sonnet 34 "These poems should have been about..."

Sonnet 35 "Put down this bag of words,"

Sonnet 36 "This is where faith begins,"

Sonnet 37 "We move with a certain grace,"

Sonnet 38 "For what is it we pray?"

Sonnet 39 "I'm no raving charismatic..."

Sonnet 40 "Our African friend Kenneth says..."

Sonnet 41 "For two thousand years..."

Sonnet 42 "You won't take offence at this,"

Sonnet 43 "A friend gave me this picture..."

Sonnet 44 "Eleven thirty."
Sonnet 45 "I remember how one night some years ago..."

© Godfrey Rust 1992, godfrey@wordsout.co.uk. See here for permissions.