EASTER, 2021

Photo from Unsplash.

The mystery of faith 
is how slippery blood first flows:
But how fast it thickens, gums. Jellies. 
C r u s t s. 

How the body’s folds and fleshy pockets
Slacken, shudder, stiffen, soften, r o t
into a neatly-wafered word.

None of us saw God’s corpse. That’s the problem. 
That’s the scandal every Easter preacher meets
crouched in the over-warm chapel, seething with stillness and the scent
of funerary flowers for God’s wake.

Christ’s rising: that’s the miracle
We fear to make. We must recraft, redraw,
withdraw the bloody shaft, re-estimate the angle
which needle-thrusts God’s Gospel to the heart: 

How deeply-mounded in this clammy corpse, how deep
the ribcage, hinged with tumors, teratoma treasures
not one part but many, dark distended flesh:
Strike through!
Strike true.

Until the dead heart stirs again, 
The grey-haired gossipers straighten, brighten, tremble
As soil might shiver! As stone! Years fall 
like dirt from rising fungal caps
Thrusting spearlike up through taut and lifeless skin:

And blood spills out again.