Tri-Sola Poetry

Tri-Sola Poetry is a division of Tri-Sola Writings, a collection of writings by author and poet Michael J. Hayes of St. Johns, Michigan. Inherently religious in nature, each Tri-Sola poem deals with one or another aspect of the difficulties of Christian living. The poems place heavy emphasis on doctrine and teachings, as opposed to poems of a similar nature that detail more one's feelings with faith.

Tagline


Tri-Sola's tagline is:

"Grace, Faith, and Scripture Alone: A Poetic Journey of Faith"

Reflections By Mike Hayes
When Tri-Sola began in 2003, Mike was experimenting with numerous religious poems, essays, and plans for a novel. Many of his ideas he wound up scrapping, as he wasn't quite sure what to do with them. The idea came early to adapt his poems into a website collection that could be updated regularly. Numerous designs were experimented with. But in the end, the poems would be published through Dozerfleet Literature. Since the literature division of Dozerfleet deals with all writings of Dozerfleet and with an emphasis on those subjects which do not directly fall under Dozerfleet Comics, it made sense to redistribute Tri-Sola through Dozerfleet Literature.

Mike's first three poems were titled "Reflections: Mere Pittance," "Petals 1.2: Surrender," and "Reflections: Powerful Comfort." "Petals," as the second of these would later be known, was actually an essay more than a poem.

The original designs for Tri-Sola web pages were crude, having been designed in Microsoft Word 2000.

Fortress Rock
From 2003 late until 2006 early, the Reflections series would be re-named Fortress Rock, to aid in clarification of focus. In this era, more designs were tried in different formats to create the web pages for each poem.

Adobe ImageReady, Photoshop, and more were used to create the pages with. By 2005, actual HTML coding was possible, allowing for almost any combination. The previous poems' names would be shortened to give them more focus. By the end of 2004, four poems would be added to the previous four from 2003. This would result in a collection of 8.

Tri-Sola era
The current name arrived in 2006, when Mike decided to rename his Fortress Rock collection Tri-Sola to focus on the doctrinal integrity he sought in his writing&mdash;primarily, the emphasis on the "sola-gracia, sola-fide, sola-scriptura" that Martin Luther emphasized. The collection is open to new poems, but was put on hiatus in 2008 after the release of "Passionate Peace."

On January 8th of 2012, "The Manager, The Cross, The Life" was released on Mike's Facebook page in his Notes section. He released "White Blood Calvary" on October 13th of 2014.

Themes
Common themes throughout Mike's poems featured guilt, redemption, volition dilemma, Lenten reflection, despair, cults, human stubbornness, and martyrdom.