Analysis of In Whose Image Are We Made?



I beseech you all.
Pray, tell me —  in honesty.
Who are we Earthlings.
Behaving as if like gods.
Rather — misbehaving folks?

With no empathy.
Miscreants of Planet Earth.
Our hearts are hardened.
Poisoning all resources —
Provisions for living things.

With Life so cheapened.
Everything returns to dust.
With no displeasure.
Sitting on our ashen thrones.
Observing our own demise.

We are false prophets.
In whose image are we made?
Not The Almighty.
Fallen Angels then we are.
Enfolded by our darkness.

We see the sunrise.
Yet reaching for the sunset.
All gods without light.
Destroyers — not creators.
Spawned in Lucifer’s workshop.

Our children ask us:
“How did this madness begin?”
We stare with blindness.
For darkness is what we know.
Hiding — with our silences.

The Earth is weeping.
The permafrost is melting.
Acid rain comes down.
Strange chemical solution.
For miscreants of the Earth.

This is our madness.
Mother Earth must not be blamed.
In times of Eden.
We were charged as guardians.
Now blinded  — and without light.


Scheme XABXX ACDEB DXXBF XXAXG FXHXX GXGXE IIXJC GXJXH
Poetic Form Etheree  (25%)
Tetractys  (20%)
Metre 10111 1110100 11110 0101111 100101 11100 1001101 101110 1001100 0101101 11110 100111 11010 10110101 01010101 11110 0110111 10010 1010111 111010 1101 110101 11011 0101010 1011 101011 1111001 11110 1101111 10110100 01110 01110 10111 1100010 1100101 111010 1011111 01110 1011100 1100011
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 1,054
Words 219
Sentences 38
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
Lines Amount 40
Letters per line (avg) 20
Words per line (avg) 4
Letters per stanza (avg) 101
Words per stanza (avg) 22

About this poem

The signs are everywhere. We can no longer escape them, the sullen archetypal images of our misbehaviors. And yet we turn from reason to embrace treason, projecting our indiscretions on those objects of nature that speak to us in allophonic languages that are alien to us; ignoring changes in the seasons, once discrete, now ever so foreboding, presenting themselves to us with eloquence as prophetic harbingers of global climate change, inviting us as citizens of the planet, to exercise collective goodwill and be once more, even as at one time in our ancient past we were, guardians of the cornucopia of earth’s bounty. The title of this Extended Tanka poem, “In Whose Image Are We Made,” invites us to take collective responsibility for protection of our divine inheritance, reminding us that we are all in it together. 

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Written on April 01, 2022

Submitted by karlcfolkes on April 01, 2022

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:05 min read
490

Karl Constantine FOLKES

Retired educator of Jamaican ancestry with a lifelong interest in composing poetry dealing particularly with the metaphysics of self-reflection; completed a dissertation in Children’s Literature in 1991 at New York University entitled: An Analysis of Wilhelm Grimm’s ‘Liebe Mili’ (translated into English as “Dear Mili”), Employing Von Franzian Methodological Processes of Analytical Psychology. The subject of the dissertation concerned the process of Individuation. more…

All Karl Constantine FOLKES poems | Karl Constantine FOLKES Books

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