Lenten Art Project--A Video Poem

At my creativity blog, I've been thinking and writing about video/animated poems and book trailers (go here, here, and here for more). I decided to create one for my Lenten art project. Because of the length of the poem, and my novice status with Microsoft Movie Maker, I kept my project to one stanza.

Here's how the poem stanza looks on the page/screen in traditional format:

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.


Here's my video/animated poem. There's no sound because I haven't experimented with that yet.

Here's the whole poem, which originally appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities (and yes, I posted it two weeks ago, so you're not going crazy):

The Precious Nature of Junk



If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.