This season of easter and of passover comes in the middle of the corona virus pandemic. Apart from the sad fact that, as in Narnia, all holidays are cancelled, it’s not a bad time to think about these narratives and traditions which concern the human relation to death and our persistent desire to somehow overcome it. It is a relationship certainly characterised by anxiety and grief; yet, at our best, we can glimpse the possibilities of change and acceptance, those small transformations of shift and slip.

Easter, during the Pandemic

Broken

like an egg into a pan

              its yellow eye &    spill

of visceral white

            

this seasonal story          of catharsis

  hurricane of catastrophe     beating

                             on this bowed back

one human body      

          

cracked

& hammered            until it is

a vanishing point             of fall    & grief     of where

the splintered edges can never be made

whole

                             no going back     only

ahead      where Lazarus slides        without reprieve  

into inexorable death      the heavy curtain

of descending quiet –

a first morning                 unspeakable    &

then a second

at last a third &                        life creaks on

jolting us forward

              awkward            scarred

into the only world                       possible

its narrow frame

its flickers of meaning

              our persistent   hearts