God’s Benevolent Potency

About this poem

This five-line one-stanza Japanese-style trilingual tanka poem, “God’s Benevolent Potency,” employs French, English, and Jamaican Creole (Patwa) to deliver a poetic amphibolous proverbial message about the nature and the tender loving kindness relationship of the Almighty God Yahweh with his people, humanity, whom, with benevolent potency, he created on the sixth day of Creation, declaring that sixth day of Creation emphatically to be “very good.” The uniquely ambiguous Jamaican sentence, “A Jah wah mek Yah,” that comprises the third line of this poem, can be translated into English either as “It is God who made God,” the sentence referring reflexively to God Himself, and to His personal name, “Yahweh;” or, in an entirely different sense, as “It is God who made you” (all of us). The Jamaican sentence, “A Jah wah mek Yah,” also makes poetic linguistic play on the name “Jamaica” itself which, when written in Jamaican Creole as “Jah mek Yah,” is expressed as a fully independent sentence interjected and expressed variously as: (1) “God made here” (this land). (2) “God made you” (humanity). (3) “God made Himself” (in His divine potency of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience). Note that in Jamaican Creole the word “Yah” (uppercase) or “yah” (lowercase) can be expressed as a proper noun, as a locative adverb, or in colloquial expression, as a second person (singular or plural) personal pronoun. Clearly, this poem is laden with both poetic and linguistic double entendre, inviting the reader to engage in an introspective metacognitive exercise concerning the metaphysics of the divine. more »