From The Page To The Screen Part One

Karina is our resident poet and we thought we'd put up a few poems she contributed to our university's Christian newsletter The Page:

Beginning

in the beginning
the night swallowed me up like death
it stitched my eyelids down
& fear held my hand like a discomforting friend.
BUT (and it’s a merciful but)
the darkness was pierced in pinpricks of light
to shine their story to my unpicked eyes –
they began with just a god-breath
were dead before my body grew out of the darkness
they are an unweary light
proclaiming ‘i was thought of’
& we were thought of
as more than atoms of incidence
built by convention & broken by death.
so i have learnt to see an end without an end
a light that does not go out
or fade or be outshone
i see an all light
(where darkness is an afterthought that never comes)
& so tomorrow
the sky will break in shame
at a glorious new beginning.

For Grace

under appreciated like a cliché
or misunderstood like a cliché
the catching hands, the helping hands,
the hands that blister, bleed and bear the scars
of hands that did and do and
all your life and all your death
will it be so, undeservedly so
do not let a syllable be taken
upon the wind of other people’s voices
but be the sound of listening
to remember
the hands that held you
before your mother
before your father
before your tongue could taste the air
remember the hands
that made you, gave you
Grace.


garden

they were dry and snapped a part
upon the pressure of His fingertip.

they were leaves so dead and brittle
to His threshing rake.

He was Gardener
this was Life.