matt@harrispoems.com 
A Message From the Author...
Although 99% of my vision has been darkened by Retinitis Pigmentosa, an incurable eye disease, poetry has given me another kind of vision. It has been like a light on a coalminer’s helmet, helping me to illuminate and to navigate through deep passages of Scripture.
While writing Leaves of Prophecy, Poems On Some Parables Of Christ, and Sonnets for Messiah, one of my primary goals was for readers to see clearly how they could enter into a relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ, who, because of His love for us, promises that "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13). These poems of the spirit will lift your spirit and give you a Christian based writing for you to read.
Leaves of Prophecy
Leaves of Prophecy travels back several millennia to visit prophecies that Scripture foretold about the end times. It then explores how they relate to us now. The book is an extension of a poem by the same title found in my first book, Poems On Some Parables Of Christ (p. 37). As for the structure of the book, it consists of one epic poem written in a form known as a pantoum.
I used this particular framework to write in because its style best conveys the apocalyptic themes of the book. It contains 2,400 lines, which are separated into ten equal parts. Its lines are divided into four-line stanzas called quatrains. Throughout the poem, the second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat themselves as the first and third lines in the subsequent stanza. The repetition of lines help to reinforce the importance of what Scripture is telling us about our world today and gives the poem an echo-like quality that provides the background music for this composition.
Poems On Some Parables of Christ
Poems On Some Parables Of Christ pries the Bible from the coffee table, dusts it off and delves into the timeless Parables of God's Son. The book rewinds us back in time to the first century when Christ, through His Parables, revealed and concealed to the world the truths of His eternal kingdom. Truths that are as relevant and poetic in the twenty-first century as they were in the days when Christ first spoke them.
Since the beginning of time, humankind has searched for the answer to this question: What is truth? To answer this question, we must first ask, "Who Is Truth?" Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). So was Jesus a liar, a lunatic? Or is He Lord and "...The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29)? Poems On Some Parables Of Christ offers its readers an exploration into the Who and What of the age-old question about truth using poetry as its guide.
Sonnets for Messiah
A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem that means “little song.” Sonnets for Messiah contains one hundred little songs sung in a prophetic voice. In Old-Testament Scripture, over 300 Messianic prophecies exist. Each prophecy was divinely inspired by God. At His first coming, Jesus accurately fulfilled these Biblical passages, which were written centuries before His birth. This collection examines one hundred of these Messianic predictions through poetry.
Its mission is to show readers what these prophecies are and how Jesus fulfilled them. Sonnets for Messiah uses three distinct sonnet forms to mold its themes: the Shakespearean, Spenserian, and Petrarchan. Each style displays its own unique rhyming pattern, and they are structured in such a way as to express ideas concisely. It is exactly this conciseness that many readers find most appealing about the sonnet. A sonnet can say as much on a subject in fourteen lines as a book of prose can say in fourteen pages!