Sheet Lightning Over the Veldt: A Spoken Word Poem

on April 1, 2019

Last week I wrote an article about finding a poem by a young man who attended a conference on global Christian persecution at which I was a speaker many years ago. I found the poem beautiful and shocking, and was very happy to have a copy of it. But, as I said in my article, I lost the poem for a long, long time and just found it when IRD was moving our offices three weeks ago.

I was a bit hesitant about posting the poem, and even more hesitant about reciting it, lest someone get the mistaken idea that I wrote this wonderful creation, or that I was trying to pass it off as my own! But for those who didn’t read my article, or who read the article but didn’t follow the link to the actual poem…I present Faith as Spoken Word Poem Artist, reciting Sheet Lightning Over the Veldt.

And if you live in either Knoxville, TN or Columbia, SC and you attended this conference around 1999 and remember who the poet was, please let me know!

And if not, I hope that you will use this powerful artistic form of advocacy yourself – whether to write a poem about persecuted Christians, or about the atrocious human rights abuses taking place in the Islamic Republic of Sudan, or…as I may try my hand at again (why not, I’ve already been accused of being an arms dealer for the Government of South Sudan and paid $2million for it – where’s the money? – because I condemn moral equivalence and the western think tank racist, colonialist, imperialists that equate defending one’s sovereign nation against armed rebel terrorist combatants with “ethnic clashes” or “both sides equally at fault – which actually always means that the Government of South Sudan is at fault!)

Where was I? Oh yeah, I may try my hand at a spoken word poem about the 6 years of insanity following the December 2013 coup attempt.

Anyway, here is the 1999 portrayal of jihad and genocide against southern Sudan, Sheet Lightning Over the Veldt:

 

  1. Comment by LaVerne Valdez on April 4, 2019 at 2:34 pm

    Faith, You have described the Sufferings of Many Peoples around the world, handed down from these Oppressors who hold “The World Currency.” For All those who are defined by Their Materialist Life Style, this Is the Price of Your so called “Freedom.” & Our Silence, as in Yemen today, makes us Complicit.

  2. Comment by barbara nelson on April 6, 2020 at 1:50 pm

    That was beautiful and very well recited. Was it possibly Derick Washington who wrote some poems at New Wineskins?

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