For what it's worth, here's what I believe. It took a long time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right--just the way it has to be. In the past year, it's gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the tight one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to:
God is Power--
Infinite,
Irresistable,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable--
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.
From Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
This verse is the first to appear in the text of a chapter, within Lauren Olamina's journals, surrounded by her commentary about the verse. Here we begin to see what this young prophet believes, and how she is working to articulate what she needs to say even though at that point in the book she has no one to talk to about these things.
I believe you can really hear Butler's voice in the character here. Authoring these verses was a careful process of many rewrites, many edits. Each word chosen and arranged with care. These verses are powerful and I believe them to be some of the most deeply true things ever written.













