Since yesterday’s dark-day afternoon the world

has held its breath, now grey from gasping,

like the one for whom she mourns.

 

Soldiers, sires, buffoons and blowhards sit

reclining at the tables strewn with their misdeeds,

and the crumbs of their macabre celebrations.

 

Smug but nervous religious puppets cannot deny

equal parts satisfaction and fear. Perhaps their best efforts

were not enough to quell this blasphemer.

 

Deals were made, hands soiled, souls blackened

in efforts to silence this upstart whose troubling words

were too unsettling to their hearts; inconvenient to stolen comforts.

 

The darker brutality of consciences, crushed,

brings disciples to their knees in regret of all regrets;

their gasping guilt and their friend, abandoned.

 

Then, in they burst, wearing the shocking certainty of sunrise

through open windows, bearing preposterous news

of a missing stone and a speaking friend.

 

Eyes, tired and red, match the renewed color

of faces now flushed in the rhetoric of unbelief;

the cloying claws of hope.

 

Running hard to see this sound, hear this sight,

they clutch their heaving chests, pinched

from anguish, tighter still from unexpected awe.

 

They see nothing where something should have been.

They see something where nothing should have been.

They see Someone who first saw them.

 

And begins a beginning.

 

The image is of a painting by Lance McNeel