Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 39:1 (Winter 2025)
Article: "The" Pericope Adulterae "(John 7:53–8:11): Two Poetic Renderings In" Sunsong Tide Rising
Author: Anna Kasafi Perkins

PP 39:1 (Winter 2025) p. 9

The Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11): Two Poetic Renderings In Sunsong Tide Rising

Anna Kasafi Perkins

Anna Kasafi Perkins (PhD) is a Senior Programme Officer with the Quality Assurance Unit, Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies, University of the West Indies Regional Headquarters, in Kingston, Jamaica. She teaches and researches in ethics, justice, popular culture, sexuality, theology, Scripture, and quality assurance, and supervises graduate students.

Remember, poetry begins in the world’s great Holy Books which are all books of poetry. Truly poems are a part of God’s great conversation with his children. . . . We wish His blessing on the schooling of your spirit through poetry.1

There is a popular Caribbean poetry series for high school students who are preparing for external regional examinations in the Commonwealth Caribbean. It is entitled Sunsong, perhaps recalling African American poet Langston Hughes’s short poem, “Sun Song,” or Jamaican Dennis Scott’s “Son Song.”2 Composed of four books of gradated difficulty, the collection’s last book is Sunsong Tide Rising,3 which expands on the three previous books while including a variety of poems from the Caribbean and the rest of the world.

Curated by two experienced teachers of English who are themselves poets,4 Sunsong Tide Rising is divided into eleven themes intended to show students that “poems are easy to understand and can help [them] deal with the whole complex business and circumstance of [their] life: the beauty and ugliness of the world; the wealth and poverty of the human situation; the kindness and cruelty of our interaction with one another.”5 As with the previous three books, the editors draw from a variety of sources, including the Bible (and poetry inspired by the Bible), the Shakespearean canon, limericks, and popular songs:

These poems come from all over the world and are of many different kinds: some are from the Bible, some are ballads (songs that tell a story), some are work songs, some are humorous, some are sad, some are dialect poems—we could go on and on.6

In Sunsong Tide Rising, I came across two poems that drew me in immediately and called to mind the taken-for-granted presence of the Bible in everyday life in the Caribbean. The poems are: “A Stone’s Throw”7 by Scottish libr...