poems | Ray Waddle

SUN-RISEN

Waking I walk the wet

green slope sun-risen to find

the trees listening, so I listen.

Easter spreads through town,

confusing the violence,

courteously engulfing it.

What we cling to’s a cadaver now –

the killing machines of conviction,

the braggart of power, that old chieftain.

After so much disinformation

we’re still too dazed to move.

So homecoming courteously finds us.

GOOD FRIDAY NOW AND AGAIN

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land

until three in the afternoon – Matthew 27:45

Global markets fizz, grocers restock against plague,

jets ascend and bank, people rise and break –

just another day around here, as if nothing special

happened that afternoon, over there.

That afternoon, over here, it was still breakfast time,

the start of a workday. The news, over there,

moved at light speed, buffeting the breeze.

Groups of people possibly glanced up as one.

I visited once, the famous church, over there,

the ancient roof and cramped unlit corridors

enclosing the hill itself, Calvary’s very stones,

the empty tomb also – all indoors now.

Posted was a sign in five languages explaining

how the skull of Adam waited deep underground

that Friday, directly below, how the trickling blood

of crucifixion found the skull, filling it just so.

At that, I needed some air. I was done with talk

of threads of blood flowing unhindered

through substrate and terminating

in the bone goblet of very Adam.

No, I’ll take this 2,000-year aftermath

6,000 miles away: this harried moment,

that inescapable day, these winds east and west

immeasurably holding everything together.