Poetry Month Post #8: “Holy Saturday’s Song”

April is #NationalPoetryMonth and I am posting a Poem-A-Day. All of the poems I am posting are poems I have written, mostly in the last year. The poem for today is one I wrote in 2013 on Holy Saturday. I have shared it on my website before.

Holy Saturday’s Song

Today, brothers and sisters of the Jesus-named faith,
You must stop and hear the still of death

The Holy One takes in no oxygen
and blood does not flow
Flesh grown cold

Still, you and I, be still
If you must move, let it be a mourning dance
If you must reverberate, a groaning trance

Today we re-member
death’s hard truth
a day of finitude, of lonely tears
and deep longing for what is gone

And death, people of Jesus,
is today’s purpose
sitting, prostrating, falling, being thrown or carefully placed into a tomb

The One who loved, who spoke truth, who touched and healed and wept
and stood up to distortion and sat down with the despised
That One, in the tomb, abides

And seeps even into the caverns of hell
to penetrate the most pervasive conditions
of our bondage, our travail

Only in death could this One
find His way into the utterly lost
the tortured
the spaces where no rest could come

He found us there
in death, in rejection
in the roots of despair
in trauma, in brutality,
in madness

And unlocked some cosmic equation
and hastened the death of damnation

The lengths that Our Liberator will go
even into the sewers, the bowels
of the unforgivable, the better off dead
the throw-aways,
the ones who no one loved
and no one missed
the ones whose last breath was celebrated
the ones ravaged by cruelty
the pieces, the peace-less
of fragments, the frailty

Today
Compassion flows into the contours of death
and befriends the most repulsive
corners of human capacity

Be still
and feel the gentle
ingress and egress of oxygen
that signals your life goes on

And sit in the possibility
of the new that gestates
today in a tomb
a womb
in mourning, in rigor mortis
in a stiff, silent chorus

Extend into
the shadows of ourselves, our real
And trust the kind of power
that tastes death
and loves and liberates even still