Poems for an Easter Weekend

FRIDAY

With its teeth, iron tears and plugs

Wrists that held; healed.

It stills the soles painted with

our dust.

Thorns prick a brow lit with our sweat.

And his heart (his heart)

Will soon expel a gasp of crimson and living water.

(We have done this.)

After he screams,

An inky, unthinkable

Silence

As life itself dies.

It is finished

Has begun.

SATURDAY

Black fear,

Aggrieved horror—

Lock the door.

When all the eggs in my basket

Break open

Poured out

What then?

Just Thursday,

He washed my feet.

Now rigid, cold,

Swaddled in linen and stone.

All I thought he was

He cannot be.

And I am left in this locked room,

My own hollow tomb.

SUNDAY

I.

Here he is again

In the cool of a garden—

New, still-warm keys in hand.

What was it like for his eyelids

Flickering open in the black,

Dank rock mixing its unyielding odor

With myrrh?

He sucks in the breath he created,

Conqueror over every death.

Linen falls, is folded,

No longer needed as his feet

sense stone.

Soldiers laugh and snore outside

Oblivious to the second

That changes everything.

II.

She blinks in plum-colored half-light

And memory again descends on her chest.

This morning, it is so hard

To rise.

Wash, comb, gather, sigh.

She meets the other two.

They walk, burdened by more than

The spices puffing and tossing at

Their thighs.

Few words for a morning like this

As the sun lifts

over planet earth

And women’s tears.

The stone, they wonder.

How.

But they pull themselves forward,

Scent rising.

This is the place,

Too beautiful for bones.

Sandals stop.

But it’s

Open.

New terror.

Two men, unearthly white.

As he said.

Hungry for more thoughts for Easter Weekend? You might like

14 Great Paradoxes of Jesus: Death [printable INFOGRAPHIC]

If Jesus Had a Tattoo

Isaiah 53, The Message (Or, how this Friday became Good)