Easter Saturday

Warning: Don't read further if you prefer hearing the Easter Message in sentimental language. I ran across this poem and liked it for the author's astonishing images of the broken world God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die for.

Holy Saturday - Poem

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by William Wenthe

Along the creek where they found the dead man,

papery disks of elm seeds

drop like scales, flecking the green

water. Coals of a pissed-out

party fire, beer cans, condoms,

torn leaves of skin

magazines: Is this what a world

looks like, its God killed and gone

to hell? Down here

is a place for sinners: deep inside,

though not quite part of

the city; where I satisfy my urge

to watch returning

warblers probe and point among buds

tipping the oak twigs red

as souls turned into trees in the Inferno

whose limbs, when snapped, seeped blood.

How quickly my imagining of hell

turns formal--an artist's, a moralist's

place, where a God might send His Son

to fetch back something he regretted

having thrown away. The caught smell

of flesh-rot fetches me to the real

carcass of a dog, tossed

on a bank where, for centuries,

the buffalo, their cowled heads lowered,

had come to drink. Those herds were damned

along with Comanches who hunted them;

sprawled over by a city

where yesterday the clear sky darkened

with clouds of greenish, toxic smoke, sent up

from a burning scrapyard--cars, old tires,

gasoline & exploding batteries--stinging the eyes

and lungs of residents in nearby

apartments, a low-rent neighborhood

expelled, an evening in exile.

I wonder, if I were there,

would I have been thinking of things to save,

or if I myself might be saved?

or just found--like the murdered man raised

out of this water, his naked skin showing signs

already of decay.