Matthew P. Anstey May 16, 2016
This Lent, perhaps all of us should fast from post-fact, post-truth, post-it language, from language more at home in smoke and mirrors than in evocation and epiphany.
And in the silence then that follows, we can perhaps hope to find again our voice, and more so, be found by the voice yearning for us.
Here is, then, a Lenten poem:
this day is a bleak day, O God
what more can I say?
this day is a day of bleeding,
from the body, from the soul
this bleak, besmeared day drifts unbound
a day not on any calendar I know of
lost, shipwrecked from yesterday,
estranged from tomorrow’s dawn
this day is all distorted, O God
hours twisted into ghastly shapes –
gaping hours that moan,
collapsed hours without form
thick hours seeping all too slowly into the earth
if despair on this dark day was for sale
I’d be rich, wretchedly rich!
but yet ... but yet ...
if I but reach out and touch your cloak
you will pause, you will face me, you will call me
and in my body and in my soul I’ll know
that my bleeding has ceased this day,
its bleakness destined for crucifixion
its blackness floodlit by resurrection
amen