Now it's your limbs he longs to flow into

An Easter poem

Happy Easter friends. Christ is risen!

It is significant to me that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead—the thread upon which all Christian faith hangs—is never described. The Gospel writers do not peer into the tomb in the early hours of Easter Sunday to show us the mechanics of this grandest of all miracles.

No, they simply move from the calamity of Friday to a world born anew on Easter Sunday. We never witness the miracle. Only the aftermath.

“I am the Resurrection” by Mike Moyers

Much, therefore, is left to our imagination, to reading between the lines, listening for hidden resonances between the syllables of the gospel story.

So much of that is the work of poets. And this one by Mary Karr does it so well, not only peering inside, but more, and better: drawing our minds into the aftermath—the way in which the Resurrected One begins to, as per Paul, “fill all things” with his fullness.

May these lines become true of you.

Enjoy.

A

“Descending Theology: Resurrection”
Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and blood ink—
till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void
even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart

began to bang on the stiff chest’s door,
and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he longs to flow into—
from the sunflower center in your chest
outward—as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.