Once you were darkness

Haiku responding to Eph 5:8-14

Once you were darkness,

now, in the Lord, you are light.

Live as Light's children.

For the fruits of Light

are all around; in those things

good and right and true.

Live to discover

that which is full of love, and

pleasing to the Lord.

Shun works of darkness;

they are not fruitful; rather,

bring them to the light.

Expose them to light!

Illuminate shameful works

that they be transformed.

Wake up you sleepers!

When you rise up from the dead

Christ will shine on you.

© Ken Rookes 2026

Clothe yourselves in Christ

 

Haiku responding to Romans 13:11-14

There's no time to waste;

get on with it. Wake up now,

there's much to be done.

Salvation is near;

it draws closer ev'ry day

since we have believed.

The night is far gone,

The day is near. Let us, then,

throw off the darkness.

Let's discard the works

of darkness and let's put on

the armour of light.

Let us live decent

lives; sober, pure, and without

envy or quarrels.

Put the flesh aside;

don't gratify it's desires.

Clothe yourselves in Christ.

© Ken Rookes 2025

From Darkness to Light

Haiku of promise

From darkness to light;

a metaphor unequalled.

One for the ages.

The darkness of fear,

uncertainty, the wondrous

light of love and hope

Oppression will end,

the burdensome bar and yoke

will be taken away.

The warriors boots

and garments covered in blood

shall be burned in fire.

A child has been born,

a son, authority rests

upon his shoulders

He has many names:

Wonderful Counsellor, Prince

of Peace, Mighty God.

With justice and truth

he'll establish David's throne.

There'll be endless peace.

Ken Rookes 2024

Published for Christmas Day. From Isaiah chapter 9

Ken Rookes 2024

They walked in darkness

 Haiku for illumination

They walked in darkness,

languishing, all hope was lost;

but light is coming.

We were blanketed

in deep darkness, but on us

God’s light is dawning.

We can now rejoice,

like when the harvest is good,

or sharing the loot!

Our heavy burdens

are lifted; our subjection

has come to an end.

Our blood-stained garments,

our oppressors’ boots, become

fuel for the fire.

A child has been born

for us, he shall reign for God

as our Prince of Peace.

Endless peace is ours;

the Lord of hosts will do this,

ruling with justice.

© Ken Rookes 2022

Days of Darkness

 

Eschatological haiku

The days of darkness

are coming upon us all;

the sun will be hid.

The moon will not shine,

and the ever faithful stars

will absent themselves.

We might all be lost,

unable to navigate,

or to find the way.

Will he be coming,

the sky-sweeping Son of Man,

to bring us all home​?

Read the signs, he told

his friends. The fig tree’s lessons

are long forgotten.

The generation

did, in fact, pass away; He

must have got it wrong.

My words will remain

when all else is gone, he said.

Ah, Lord, but which ones?

When not expected

the Master will return. Be

about his business.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Not yet enough

 

Days of darkness,

days of fear.

The sun is hidden,

Even the moon directs its light elsewhere,

bending its rays away from planet earth.

The stars absent themselves,

as if there is not yet enough darkness.

The shadows expand and creep to embrace the forlorn landscape,

growing warmer every day.

The Son of Man, they say,

comes in the clouds to gather the elect.

Does he?

There are signs for those who can read,

but the good christian folk cannot see them,

having found more earthly distractions.

The fig tree’s lessons have been forgotten.

The generation did, in fact, pass away,

as have hundreds since.

Must have got it wrong.

His words, Mark tells us, will remain for all time.

The good christians all concur,

but find it hard to agree on which ones.

The story tells us that the master will return

at an inconvenient hour.

The faithful servants will not be fazed.

© Ken Rookes 2020

The Dawn is coming

“God has called you to your life.  Let it speak.  Let nothing get in the way of being the person that you are.  Zachariah claimed in his prophecy that through the birth of Jesus, “we have been rescued from the power of our enemies so that we could serve him without fear.”  We need no longer fear.  We need no longer hide from God or from each other.  We are free to use the gifts that God has granted us for God’s purposes.  We can serve God in our homes, in our churches, and in our workplace.  We can serve God with our hearts, hands, feet, and minds.  We are free to love God, because it is only in freedom that love is possible.  We are free to love ourselves because we know that we were created in the image of the God that is love.  We are free to love one another because God has called us to do no less.

… Through our freedom, humanity has created many dark and terrible places.  The shadow of death at times looms large over our world, but in the midst of darkness a baby is born.

Zachariah saw a great purpose in his son’s life.  People wondered, “What then will this child be?”  John grew to be the voice in the wilderness that cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

What then will you be?  For what purpose have you been created?  Use what you have been given to do as John did.  Prepare the way of the Lord.  Show people the way of salvation.  Find those that sit in the shadow of death, and sit next to them.  Hold their hand.  Weep with them.  Give them love.  Show them the light, and declare that the dawn is coming.  Declare that the dawn is coming, and let the Holy Spirit guide us on the path of peace.” (fatpastor.com)

Hide and seek

Hide and seek

We are children.

We play hide and seek,

and cling to the shadowed places;

pretending that no one can see us.

Imagining that we

will not be found.

The light is not our friend.

Send it away,

lest it shine revealingly

upon our hiding places;

our living, our dying,

the things we do.

Seductive darkness, brush our cheeks.

Let our eyes remain closed,

reassured;

that we might continue

our multiple deceptions.

Lest we be found.

The darkness is many;

the cracks

through which the light comes in

are few.

The candle flame flickers;

Small, but defiant.

© Ken Rookes 2015.

Good Friday shame

 

On the first Good Friday,
so named some years later by people of faith;
the darkness was faced and defied;
and, in the days following, banished.
Well, not quite.
But a candle glimmer was ignited,
a hopeful something that later torrents of blackness
have never quite extinguished.
Otherwise women and men of faith
could never have survived.
Not the shame of religious wars,
inquisitions,
holocaust,
diverse conquests and killing fields,
or clerical abuse of children.
And certainly not the off-shore detention camps
where human suffering and despair
are made the wretched by-product
of the vile and fearful politics
practised by some
for whom Good Friday pretends to be a sacred day.
And still women and men of faith survive
to maintain their outrageous claim:
that the darkness has somehow been diminished,
at least a little.

© Ken Rookes 2014

One certainty

See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Jeremiah 1:10

The emergence of a civilization delivers one certainty,
and only one:
that it will one day fall.
This cycle of rising and decline happens slowly;
a stop-motion animation
condensed into narrow chapters
in a one-volume history of the world.
The boy-prophet, Jeremiah, was appointed,
according to the ancient text,
to preside over such comings and goings
among a handful of middle-eastern nations;
including his own.

Nationalism, it seems, matters little to God.
This unorthodox divinity cares nothing
for notions of national destiny;
still embarrassingly popular in our own steadily unwinding era.
National pride is yet conscripted
to provide delusional justification for all manner of greedy,
shameful and violent activities.
The planet and its people continue to weep beneath the burden.

The promise of national restoration flashed unexpectedly
among Jeremiah’s layered images of dark destruction,
bringing glimmers of hope.
Two and a half millennia later the darkness is denser,
and hope’s shadow is all that remains.

© Ken Rookes 2013.

From within the human heart

The human heart, vulnerable and doubting,

is the place where everything begins.

It covers itself with light,

it shrouds itself in shadows;

and from seasons bright and seasons dark

produces its fruits.

From fearful seeds

the heart grows thorny brambles

of hate, deceit and greed.

These entwine with other frightened souls,

multiplying their sad despair

to deny life and its possibilities.

From hopeful seeds

the heart grows trees of compassion,

love and peace. With delight and celebration,

they urge other hearts to set aside their fears

to dance exultantly, to live defiantly;

to let go.

Fear and hope;

the human heart, fragile and uncertain,

is the place where everything begins.

© Ken Rookes

Spirit of Truth

A new day dawns,

from time to time,

when sentient beings,

such as myself,

and you, curious reader,

experience moments

of such wondrous lucidity

that it seems we have moved

from a place of darkness

to one of light. The dawning

is mostly welcomed. For some,

those days arise more frequently

than they do for others;

the enlightenments may be serial,

and the truths will often compound.

John, the gospel-writer,

tells of the Advocate Spirit,

friend and companion

to men and women of faith,

who is promised to create

occasional recognitions of truth

filled with colour, light and beauty;

choreographing dancings for weary feet,

composing arias in ache-filled hearts

and leading the pilgrim soul

to places of grateful weeping.

Such illuminations may,

on occasions, so inspire the open-minded

that nations are led to cease their fighting,

nature begins to find healing,

people stop being quite so fearful,

and the hitherto vanquished power

of generous love receives its chance

and reclaims a small foothold.

© Ken Rookes 2012

The medium is the message

The medium we call light

has many shapes.

From the muted glowing lamps

and flaming torches

that illuminated the dark hours

of centuries long past

to the LCD screens that occupy

our walls and desks

and inhabit our pockets in the present age.

Light, so long cosseted and valued

as the first defence against fear and evil,

has become the plaything

of the distracted and the self-obsessed.

Dancing with inconsequentiality,

light’s frivolous tweetings

declare the hollowness of contemporary culture

and the victory of fashion.

The medium is the message*.

We do well to recall

the pre-technological power of light,

the dim flickering flame

shining alone to defy the encroaching dark

and to define the limits

of greed and cruelty.

We remember, too, one who stepped boldly

into the midst of darkness to be light;

whose speakings and touchings,

and groanings and dyings,

enfleshed a word of grace,

such that those who looked upon him,

and the ones who heard his stories,

would see that light,

comprehend its message,

and be captured by it.

* Marshall McLuhan

© Ken Rookes 2012

Not lose heart

Darkness and light flow in waves,

fluctuating between deep nothingness,

occasional blurry dimness,

waning cold full-moon shine,

the vision-challenging defeated and fading

glow of dusk,

and the surprising stabs of radiant illumination

that break infrequently through the despair.

In the mystery of creation’s brilliant blast,

truth, and the justice

which is ordained to attend truth,

were somehow encoded

into the DNA of the cosmos.

They may be seen intermittently,

borne upon sporadic rays of luminosity.

Thus, in countless stories

imagined, told and written

by every tribe, culture and religion,

truth emerges from the shadows to triumph

and justice is seen to prevail.

Jesus, the story-teller from Nazareth,

also made up such tales,

including one wherein an otherwise

crooked and godless judge

was caused to grant unexpected justice

to a persistent widow.

In real life things are not so simple,

nor are righteous results guaranteed

amongst the many shades of grey.

The poor continue to hunger,

the innocent still languish in prison cells

cruel lies remain unchallenged

and wars go on, being fought for reasons

which are seldom just or true.

Still we whisper among ourselves,

calling forth a strange and precious something

glowing defiantly through the gloom

with words of encouragement to the faithful:

“do not lose heart.”

© Ken Rookes 2010