These poems are from The Flower of Poetry, a series of poems by the inhabitants of an imaginary country. The poems reflect on the fallout of a crucial event in their history, when the people were saved but at tremendous cost: the road to God they had been seeking was closed forever, and their king stopped the resulting unrest through the previously unknown practice of political marriage. The poems focus on patience and hope: the world has gone wrong, but this, too, must be a step along the Way.
As the Old Testament gave early Christians a vocabulary for articulating the story of Jesus and Christian hope, my stories do the same for me. I also was inspired by the way the Psalms depict David’s life through seemingly unrelated songs through repeated words and motifs.
The nice thing about writing in a new language is that I get to make up words to fit what I want to say! But this is harder than it sounds; the languages develop their own logic over time, and unbreakable rules. So I’ve included notes from leading scholars of this country to give a glimpse into these rules.
