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Alli Lindquist

Blackout Theology

Poems by Alli Lindquist




These poems were created from torn out pages of a book called “Introducing Evangelical Ecotheology” that I bought when I first began struggling between the attitudes of Christians and what I believed was the nature of Christ. My intent was not to disgrace the book by tearing out these pages and creating poems from them, but it was a form of therapy. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that some Christian apologists created an entire book to attempt to get others to care about the earth when experiencing the earth is right outside. These poems point back to the messiness and the truth of the human experience. I wanted to let myself search for sacred moments in art by experiencing art and emotion as a relationship to the divine.



I.

Suspiciously / The “least of these”

Do not turn away / From violence

They may supply the needy with / Balance

Underscoring his plea / Early

Society maintained need

Without restraint or thought

Economic growth / Of extraction and extinction

Ultimately / All who amass wealth unjustly

Will prove to be fools

Where abundance is peasant


II.

An anxious relationship / Is fragile and fearful

Amid these tribulations

A sword / Gains a sense of why

Glory / Scorned

Creation-intoxicated / Christians are

Mere speculation

Every part / Acclaimed the elements feared

And the / Flowers smiled

To the hiddenness of God


III.

Dear Sirs:

This much is clear

No response to that anxiety

Has much to do with / Reverberations

The land mourns / For the futility of / Freedom

Our purpose is / Human sin

To become / What we are

Both humanity and ecosystems


IV.

Rippling and rolling waves / Enraptured

Narrate- / that it feels like coming home

Such a liminal space / Transitional waters

Physiological alterations / Can be spiritual spaces

Utterly Other / See the space we inhabit as holy

The soil underfoot invade the space between our toes

We will discover / Life in return









Alli is a neuroscientist who likes to stray from science into writing and art. She just published her first collection of poems and has a collection of bugs on her work desk- ask her which she thinks is cooler.

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