I hit a milestone this week, of sorts. I finished my 15th psalm a few days ago, meaning I am a tenth of the way through the 150 psalms in Psalms.

​This is how I spent my last two weeks:

I used to say — even as recent as two weeks ago — that I didn't read ahead before I wrote.  No more! If I hadn't read this psalm before I wrote it, I wouldn't have known that the last verse was the exact same as the first verse. So, a little planning needed to be implemented before starting this one.

This psalm, Psalm 9, was twenty verses long, which doubles the average length of the psalms to this point. The NIV says, To the tune of "The Death of the Son."  I'm not sure how that song goes, but hopefully, this is not too far off.

As I was writing this one, I was thinking that I had written in this meter before. But it turns out that Psalm 1, Psalm 4 and Psalm 5 were all sort of in this same style, but not this exact meter.

This poem along with the next two were all finished on the same day, during a particularly productive writing day for me. Last Saturday, I finished with Psalm 10. On Sunday, I finished Psalm 11, then wrote Psalm 12 and Psalm 13.

I am writing these poems in Psalms much more quickly than I wrote the poems for Job, or so it seems. The reason for that, I think, are that there are generally so fewer verses in these early psalms. It was only in April of this year that I started recording the dates when poems were finished — wish I would have started that practice years ago!

When I was writing from Job last year, I only had to rotate between six different metered lines, one for each of the six characters in the story. For this project, this is the 13th poem and the 13th different meter used.

Make that the 14th different meter used.

I really like the way this one turned out. I was a little miffed as to how to proceed when I initially encountered it in the Bible, but I gradually saw that it truly had a beginning (the questions), a middle (consisting of a single run-on sentence), and an ending (the answer).

This is where I celebrated (to myself) the fact that I was a tenth of the way through Psalms and was planning to end this post with this poem.  But, I finished the next one a few days later. Going to bed on Friday night, I hated it. Saturday morning, after a few changes, it wasn't so bad, after all. I've made a few more changes mid-post, and now I rather like it.

I would have preferred to have had lines of alternating 12 and 9 syllables instead 12 syllables throughout. But, nine beats per line would not have been enough room to complete some of the sentiment of David.

Only after I was nearly done, struggling with some the wording and reading some commentaries, did I stumble across this being The Golden Psalm. It was then, that I discovered that Paul quoted from this psalm a couple of times in Acts 2:25-31 and also in Acts 13:35.  You can read about it here and here.

A few months ago, I was writing fairly furiously. I was cranking out a new poem every few days to a few weeks. Then I got bogged down on a poem I was writing and just stopped.

I joined an online community to share some of my poetry. First, I dug out and submitted some older secular poetry I'd written YEARS ago. And they loved those. Some of my poems got thousands of views, dozens of "likes" and many nice comments.

Then, I started weaving in the poetry I am writing now, i.e. the Job poems. The thousands of views dropped to barely a hundred, the "likes" dwindled as did the comments. I was even kicked out of one the forums because the moderator didn't like me "proselytizing" my "Abraham" poems.

OK.

So, I abruptly stopped that. I'd been spinning my wheels for about a month and a half now with nothing to show for it.

After a few days of soul-searching (read: sulking), I got the urge to write again. Ever since I wrote the 40 poems from Job last year, I've been thinking ahead to the Psalms.

As a teenager, I wrote a handful of poetry from Psalms, but gave it up. Partly, because they were so bad, but mostly because it was so daunting. Everyone knows there are 150 Psalms. 150! Plus, its already been done before. Several poets through the years have set the Psalms to rhyme.

I wrote Psalm 1 a couple of weeks ago. It was like nothing I'd ever written before. The first lines of every verse contain 11 syllables, followed by 10, 12 and 8 syllables, respectively.

Three days later, I finished Psalm 2.  I was freed from the constraints of writing in one of the six styles within my Job project, where every speaker had his own rhythm.

At first, I was caught up with trying come up catchy titles like I did for Job.  But after the fifth poem was written, and the next day I was still struggling with the title, I dropped the titles and stripped all of that clutter away.

The fact that I no longer had to title my poems was a wonderful feeling!  I could simply look at a Psalm, find the pattern, and write!

So, in the course of a little more than two weeks now, the Lord's allowed me the ability to write these seven poems.  It helps that they've been rather short, so far.

I really like the way Psalm 6 turned out as well as the next one.

But, I'm not sure why upender is NOT a word! There are large pieces of equipment that have upender in their name, but yet it isn't in the dictionary?

As I mentioned concerning my Job poetry, I usually don't look ahead or read the entire chapter before I start.  I concentrate on the first verse or two to determine the rhyming scheme, then am always happily blown away when the rest of the chapter conforms to that pattern.

In this instance, however, when I was checking to see how long the chapter was, my eyes fell on the word "hollow" in verse 15, and glancing at the previous verse I saw a series of events and thought of the word "follow". So, I had that in mind when I started writing the poem. And, what do you know? The Lord worked it all out for me!

A shiggaion of David, which he sang to the LORD concerning Cush, a Benjamite.​