Easter 2012

St Martha's on the Hill

I wake to a glorious absurdity.
'Risen from the dead' – what divine nonsense!
Death is death, and that's it;
there is no undiscovered country,
no other shore across a final sea.

Yet twenty centuries on, twenty disciples
and one dog,
climb the hill in the morning gloaming,
as drizzle falls,
and tell the nonsense story once again,

and one dog

and believe
that our sense isn't God's sense.

And the world over
on hills, in houses and holy places
believers throng
to greet the one who wouldn't let
death be.

The downs have disappeared into the mist.
St Martha's is a stubborn island
where shadowy trees stand sentinel,
as twenty defiant disciples and one dog
sing praise, sing praise to God amidst the gloom.

St Martha's Photo: GNU free documentation license 

GFDL/CC-BY-SA

Holy Saturday

hiatus. Flowers
on a cross, the curtain torn,
the audience hushed

Good Friday

Evocative names - Gethsemane, Golgotha, Emmaus,
echoing in the streets of Guildford, Godalming, Esher –
exotic relics from a quaint and bygone culture,
or eternal stations of the cross?

A garden watered with tears of blood –
Gethsemane, where love and sorrow meet,
confounding the myth of the passionless god,
greeting betrayal with tears and a kiss.

Politics and piety conspire to hang three men
with pain unthinkable, breathless, searing thirst.
The promised paradise seems far away from
the place of the skull, called Golgotha.

What's to come? A dusty road, a walk –
two, wondering at the truth of the women's report
will wait and greet a third, and wander on
and wake to broken bread and hope reborn at Emmaus.

Maundy Thursday

He'd have had his feet washed sometime,
not with rich perfume or gushing tears,
but with water, by a hard-pressed servant,
slave almost, eyes cast down, and
shoulders sagging from a lifetime's toil.

And he'd have noticed. The servant
would have mattered, have counted to him.
And he'd have stored up in his heart
how our comfort comes at others' cost,
our humanity drains as we deny the human.

That night of all nights, in the upper room,
stripped of all finery he washed our feet,
became the untermensch, beneath notice.
Peter noticed, and couldn't bear it. A kingdom
without kings, a commonwealth of servants.

Have we kept the kingdom free of slaves,
learned the hard lesson he taught to Peter,
been servants of all, and sought the lowest place?
Remember the dusty feet that stumbled and fell
carrying the heavy cross to Calvary.