Good Friday, April 6, 2007 
Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Psalm 22:1-11, Hebrews 10:1-25, John 18:1-19:42

This is the day we speak
in fragments, our tongues,
like our thoughts, unhinged.
Lost, we wander in
the waste places we usually avoid;
because the body is broken,
what we thought we knew
has shattered
on the hard wood,
hatred’s tree. 

This is the day suffering holds sway;
the day darkness reigns at noon,
and even the earth groans, grieving;
while nature’s maker is unmade.

This is the day the principalities
have their way, religion and empire
conspire to grasp love in greedy hands,
nail it down, bleed it dry, killing
what they seek to own.

This is Death’s day.

Not the good death for which
we hope, pillowed and surrounded
by family and friends,speaking wisdom
as we cross.

No, this crossing
is a different sort, splayed
and gasping, abandoned, nearer hell
than heaven, impaled on hatred’s rusty spike,
all the spite of a world that wills
not to be mended heaped like thorns
upon the healer’s head.

This is Death’s day.

A killing frost has come to waste
the blossoms and the tender leaves.
A poet who has not yet
written all her poems
struggles for the next breath,
betrayed by failing lungs.
Elsewhere, mothers howl and hold
for the last time sons who will never
dance at weddings,
and each of us knows,
in the heart of hearts,
the dread seeds
of our own ending.

Another time, we will speak of
the new that follows all undoing.
This day, not knowing where to turn,
we simply stand
in the wasted land,
at the crossroads,
waiting.

This day, love stood here, too,
and chose to stay.