The entombment of all that wrath
bespeaks the stench of a
fragmenting into
finality.
To me, this matters.
I anchor there as to a lifeline,
there where
what other self-bound persons
had wrapped and lovingly
laid, a total
loss for all, for all
was found in purity, among his friends
changed, but the same time opening
everything on earth to the
power that lifted him.
No wonder Paul cried out,
“I count all loss…” — above all, loss.
Among us, Jesus found
encrusted words and structures;
he washed and brushed them clean
and out of the intractability
of history learned by rote
stepped, in simplicity the exemplar,
into the prairies of
dutiful days, each with the taste
of moving slowly towards…without
the horizon coming any closer.
His are the evenings of a
king in a cave kept wakeful by
deftly deciphering the
poems he found written in his heart.
When most of his people trailed
about in molting plumage —
aping, through fear and envy,
those not themselves —
he brokenheartedly
tried to put heart in them
again, or rouse them to the dread, in time,
that dragged them down
into insensibility.
In the besieged city
he moved among the panic-crazed;
and where skin-and-bone
cannibals crept or
by the walls, rocked against the rock
like a cribbed infant.
Once for a time
all of them were
strangers far from home.
They knew the wreckage to be
faced and put together somehow
on their return some day.
Once again there, Jesus too found
words twisted, rubble about, and
again he swept and tended them
gently, almost smiling
when some who so cherished
the traditional that they urged
stains, gritty particles, dust
must be left, too, untouched.
His words flowed from a
clear wellspring always ’til now
a little tainted by the
hand that cupped to drink, or the
crafted ladle.
Why was this one then
dragged off and left abandoned to
indifferent cruelty once, with no
home left, anywhere?
Entombment, however, is
new in all history.
What it is for.