Resurrection Stories

Today will be a busy day for many of us.  I am soon off to church.  I'll go to my favorite family service, and since my spouse only sings 8 bars of music in the later service, I may opt for quiet reading/writing in the fellowship hall while waiting for him.  After the late service, we are part of the money counting team.  Then we will get home and have some quiet time in the afternoon.

There will be no bunny cake.  My spouse wanted to grill a ham for Easter, but we did that on Friday, since we had more time; it ended up not being a ham but a pork roast, and it was delicious.  Maybe later today we'll throw some steaks on the grill.

My 19 year old vegetarian self would not recognize me.

I am looking forward to hearing the Easter message, that death does not have the final word, although in many a season, it sure does look like death will have the final word.  It's been a Lent of many cancers, many of them which have migrated.  None of them have been in my body, but there's an agony to being a witness.  I'm going to write a poem about that aspect and tie it in to the Good Friday vision of the women at the foot of the cross.

But not today.  Today is a day to remember the various commitments to resurrection.  Here's one of my favorite poems on that subject, at least one of the favorites of the ones I've written.  This one first appeared in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard (Pudding House Publications, 2004). The poem is based on real events, and I wrote it to remind myself of the possibility of miracles.

Rainy Redemption


She told us the X-ray showed a black
spot on her lung. We assumed the cancer harbored
in her breast had set on an odyssey
for new land, and when we didn’t see her
again, we assumed the worst.

Three years later, the flowers bloomed in their annual
tribute to spring, and I saw
her in a parking lot. At first, I thought I saw a ghost,
but I held her fleshly
form, still sapling-thin, and knew she had returned,
Lazarus-like, to live among us again.

Our culture focuses on the lost, the missing
in action, but we forget the world commits
to resurrection and reunion. The twig of a tree
sends sap to its tips, the crispy lawn returns
to a life filled with chlorophyll, muscles
wait for the mind to remember what they never forgot,
each generation resurrects the music of its elders,
babies look towards the sky for the familiar
face of the missing parent, history holds
us in its hands and offers rainy redemption.