The Postmodern- A Poem By Don Carson
The Postmodern
At last we know all truth is gray: no more
Faith’s raucous rhetoric, this blinding trap
Of absolutes, this brightly colored map
Of good and bad: our ocean has no shore.
Dogmatic truth is chimera: deplore
All arrogance: the massive gray will sap
The sparkling hues of bigotry, and cap
The rainbow, mask the sun, make dullness soar.
Yet tiny, fleeting hesitations lurk
Behind the storied billows of the cloud
Like sparkling, prism’d glory in the murk:
The freedom of the gray becomes a shroud.
Where nothing can be false, truth must away—
Not least the truth that all my world is gray.
–D.A. Carson, Published in First Things, (No. 93, May 1999), p. 51.
At last we know all truth is gray: no more
Faith’s raucous rhetoric, this blinding trap
Of absolutes, this brightly colored map
Of good and bad: our ocean has no shore.
Dogmatic truth is chimera: deplore
All arrogance: the massive gray will sap
The sparkling hues of bigotry, and cap
The rainbow, mask the sun, make dullness soar.
Yet tiny, fleeting hesitations lurk
Behind the storied billows of the cloud
Like sparkling, prism’d glory in the murk:
The freedom of the gray becomes a shroud.
Where nothing can be false, truth must away—
Not least the truth that all my world is gray.
–D.A. Carson, Published in First Things, (No. 93, May 1999), p. 51.
