Awestruck

About this poem

This acrostic three-line 5-7-5 metered haiku poem examines and contrasts the awe of a thunderclap with the echoing resounding awe and fear it registers with ironic brilliance in people’s primitive mammalian hind brains seeing the magical display of heavenly fireworks that leaves their outer comprehension of the divine in utter darkness that contrasts with the dazzling brilliance of the night sky alight in a background of utter darkness. This poem invites us, as presumptuous Homo Sapiens, to remain awestruck, compliant and obedient in the presence of the divine and, as American author and critic Edgar Allen Poe reminds us, in his confessional nineteenth century essay, “The Imp of the Perverse,” to take note of the impish paradoxical perverseness of our trumpet-tongued diatribe nature as we continue to wax in gross ignorance while exercising the cognitive faculties of our forebrain as ‘modern man,’ still failing in our efforts to comprehend the divine attributes of God in his omniscience, his omnipresence, and his omnipotence. This poem was composed under divine inspiration, with the lightning and thunder bolt imagery symbolically reflecting the fiery hand of God’s guidance, and the fearsome voice of God’s commandments. (Biblical References: Exodus 19:16-19; Psalm 114:7) more »