Two Easter Poems

Peter Cottontail from Golgotha

Easter Bunny footprints in white flour
trail from the front door and up the stairs to his room,
its paws pressed against the armchair
where Easter mommy had earlier
placed the basket of eggs and gifts,
the sleeping boy oblivious
to everything but the resurrection
of his annual dream.


Into the Sanctuary
September 1996
I am come again into the sanctuary where I played Jesus
in The Last Supper last Easter. I am come on the knees
of my strength, no false messiah, no spirit-gummed beard
nor long-wigged visions concealing the man separated from
his wife for over a year who finally slept with a woman
and still regarded it as adultery, regarded it that way during
the liturgical play, since it occurred only the night before.

I am come again into the sanctuary where I played Christ
as Judas betrayed the God I performed to a transfixed
congregation - moved by the Spirit to understand my
betrayal, transubstantiating my grief into that of Jesus.

I am come again into the sanctuary where I came
the day before my wife threw me out of the house
more than a year before I played Christ,
come then as I did as a reporter covering the funeral
of a dead musician whom I did not know. I spent that day
covering the story of his death from the funeral service
to the rock bar wake and home to her wrath.
The year and a quarter before those events was
separated by the gulf between faith and fidelity.

January 1997
I am come again into the sanctuary two full years since
that first funeral, here for yet another burial,
while on this day's tomorrow
a judge will pronounce our marriage over in
thirty days from the hour of his edict. I am come again
into the sanctuary in love with another woman,
one who shields herself from her hopes of me
in the company of a man she does not love.
And in this second funeral, as in the first, the man
I have come to honour, is a man much loved,
but long suffering with disease, triumphant in character
and heroic in the eyes of his wife and son.

May 1997
I am come again into this sanctuary four months
after that second funeral,
all pretense of new romance in ruins,
the dawn of my soul imminent,
the ancient stone of the old church
radiant with generations of liturgical birth,
death, marriage and baptismal blessings
and lives lived with degrees of decency
I can only imagine.

I am come again to sanctuary.