Since yesterday’s dark-day afternoon the world
has held its breath, now grey from gasping,
like the one for whom she mourns.
Soldiers, sires, buffoons and blowhards sit
reclining at the tables strewn with their misdeeds,
and the crumbs of their macabre celebrations.
Smug but nervous religious puppets cannot deny
equal parts satisfaction and fear. Perhaps their best efforts
were not enough to quell this blasphemer.
Deals were made, hands soiled, souls blackened
in efforts to silence this upstart whose troubling words
were too unsettling to their hearts; inconvenient to stolen comforts.
The darker brutality of consciences, crushed,
brings disciples to their knees in regret of all regrets;
their gasping guilt and their friend, abandoned.
Then, in they burst, wearing the shocking certainty of sunrise
through open windows, bearing preposterous news
of a missing stone and a speaking friend.
Eyes, tired and red, match the renewed color
of faces now flushed in the rhetoric of unbelief;
the cloying claws of hope.
Running hard to see this sound, hear this sight,
they clutch their heaving chests, pinched
from anguish, tighter still from unexpected awe.
They see nothing where something should have been.
They see something where nothing should have been.
They see Someone who first saw them.
And begins a beginning.
The image is of a painting by Lance McNeel
Robert Alan Rife
Latest posts by Robert Alan Rife (see all)
- Incoming – God’s Hope in Our Tedium - December 13, 2017
- Mercy – The Dare of Jesus - January 20, 2016
- Soul care or self-pity? - August 21, 2015
Aye, You saved the best for today! Great poem Rob. God Bless You Man!
Bob, as usual, you’re such a delight. Blessed Easter celebrations to you and yours this day!