Stranger in the Temple
Living with Margaret, I tend to get rather swept up in Holy Week. This is the third year I'm planning to go with her to the Easter Vigil at St.-Martin-in-the-Fields (it's gorgeous; there's a candlelit procession around the church, then a bonfire on the front steps as the sun comes up), and then have a massive Easter dinner for friends at the flat afterwards. (We were planning to have it on the roof, the way we did last year, but, well - Britain seems to be experiencing a new Little Ice Age. It was freezing cold this morning, and as if we needed to be dissuaded any further, bouts of SNOW and HAIL started while we were out buying lamb chops and filo for dinner. THANKS, WE GOT THE MESSAGE ALREADY.)
I actually really enjoy it; everyone at St. Martin's is very laid-back, so I never feel awkward being a visitor there (for those of you who might not know, I'm an ex-Catholic, ex-Pagan agnostic). And it's a truly fantastic ritual, for someone who doesn't have religious rituals of her own, in a world where secular civic rituals have seriously declined.
It's also really interesting to talk with my Christian friends around this time of year about their ideas of God and resurrection. So, long story short, even though I'm not strictly celebrating Holy Week myself, I'm surrounded by its ideas and images.
And one of the results this year was this poem.
It started out being a sestina, but it's only got three stanzas. So it's half a sestina. Also, the line length is not strictly sestina-esque. Deal with it.
In three days you will celebrate the Resurrection.
Meanwhile, you stagger home from church, face white;
every year you can still be shattered by that story,
it lashes at you - from triumphal march through death -
before casting you back into London’ noise and dirt.
One of your students gave you a ribboned egg.
It reminds me of Kathmandu, circling the white
stupa with its painted eyes and dome like a squat egg;
one prayer wheel, grimy and dark as brass-fretted dirt,
turned carelessly under my fingers, and the old story
chanted itself through my head, of my mother’s death
and I asked forgiveness for my own resurrection.
Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps His death cracked death
open and from the hollowed shell of that world-egg
hatched new heaven and new earth. Perhaps that Resurrection
was all a bedtime tale, and the yellowed-white
bones of Jesus of Nazareth lie under Palestinian dirt.
It may not be true - but it makes a damned good story.