Easter Hymn

Arcabus

Easter Hymn

Death, and darkness get you packing,

Nothing now to man is lacking,

All your triumphs now are ended,

And what Adam marred is mended;

Graves are beds now for the weary,

Death a nap, to wake more merry;

Youth now, full of pious duty,

Seeks in thee for perfect beauty,

The weak, and aged tired, with length

Of days, from thee look for new strength,

And Infants with thy pangs Contest

As pleasant, as if with the breast;

Then, unto him, who thus hath thrown

Even to contempt thy kingdom down,

And by his blood did us advance

Unto his own Inheritance,

To him be glory, power, praise,

From this, unto the last of days.

Henry Vaughan

 

Seven Stanzas at Easter

J. Kirk Richards

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike 

“Let us not mock God with metaphor…let us walk through the door.” Updike goes for the jugular in this poem. He wants us to face the tension of the story. To look at it for what it claims to be and not diminish the discomfort it causes or the questions it raises. There are a lot (and I mean a lot) of poems about the resurrection, but Updike’s has a direct tone that I appreciate. 



 

Crucifixion: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross

Arcabus

Crucifixion: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross

See, as they strip the robe from off his back
And spread his arms and nail them to the cross,
The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black,
And love is firmly fastened onto loss.
But here a pure change happens. On this tree
Loss becomes gain, death opens into birth.
Here wounding heals and fastening makes free
Earth breathes in heaven, heaven roots in earth.
And here we see the length, the breadth, the height
Where love and hatred meet and love stays true
Where sin meets grace and darkness turns to light
We see what love can bear and be and do,
And here our saviour calls us to his side
His love is free, his arms are open wide.

Malcolm Guite


The inside-outness of this poem is wonderful. Guite captures the convergence of opposites in the person of Jesus – loss/gain, wound/heal, death/birth, defeat/victory. The Easter story goes against  every human instinct. Power in weakness? Victory in death? It bends my mind.  

Love is Come Again

Benoît Trimborn

Love is Come Again

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
love lives again, that with the dead has been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain,
thinking that never he would wake again,
laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
he that for three days in the grave had lain,
quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving in pain,
thy touch can call us back to life again,
fields of hearts that dead and bare have been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

J.M.C. Crum

He is risen! Happy Easter!

A Quiet Roar

J Kirk Richards, "Though He Were Dead, Yet Shall He Live"

A Quiet Roar

one

he lays his left hand along the beam

hand that moulded clay into fluttering birds

hand that cupped wild flowers to learn their peace

hand that stroked the bee’s soft back and touched death’s sting

two

he stretches his right hand across the grain

hand that blessed a dead corpse quick

hand that smeared blind spittle into sight

hand that burgeoned bread, smoothed down the rumpled sea

three
 

he stands laborious

sagging, split, homo erectus, poor bare forked thing

hung on nails like a picture

he is not beautiful

blood sweats from him in rain

far off where we are lost, desert dry

thunder begins its quiet roar

the first drops startle us alive

the cloud no bigger

than a man’s hand

Veronica Zundel 

We know this story so well. Jesus, God's son, dies on the cross. We know it was for love of us. For love of the whole world. Did nature, did the animals know their Creator walked the earth? Did they recognize him? The winds and waves did. And when he was crucified, the sun darkened, there were earthquakes, rocks split apart, and the curtain in the temple was torn in two. And yet somehow, Jesus' death in the midst of all this, was easily overlooked by humans. 


  

Palm Sunday

Minerva Teichert, "Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem"

        Palm Sunday
 

        Astride the colt and claimed as King
        that Sunday morning in the spring,
        he passed a thorn bush flowering red
        that one would plait to crown his head.

        He passed a vineyard where the wine
        was grown for men of royal line
        and where the dregs were also brewed
        into a gall for Calvary’s rood.

        A purple robe was cast his way,
        then caught and kept until that day
        when, with its use, a trial would be
        profaned into a mockery.

        His entourage was forced to wait
        to let a timber through the gate,
        a shaft that all there might have known
        would be an altar and a throne.

        Marie J. Post