This poem is reposted with the permission of the author. It was originally posted on her site here.
Visit www.marciamountshoop.com for more from her!
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
