Before God’s last laugh of resurrection, in order to lean more deeply into the narrative of these three days (tri-duum) of promises, communion, mandates of love, betrayal, miscarriage of justice, ignoble death, hollow silence, and dashed hopes, I’ll be posting poetry for each day: Maundy Thursday, “Good” Friday, and Holy Saturday.

Today is called, ironically, “Good” Friday. Obviously, a name given well after-the-fact since no one alive during those days would likely have called it such. Even a quick Google search produced this: “The earliest known use of the term “Good Friday” is found in the South English Legendary, a text from around 1290, where it is written as “guode friday”. While the exact origin is debated, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites this as the earliest evidence.”

However, we have the benefit now of two thousand years of hindsight and written accounts from which to backwards engineer the stunning events of that day. What was macabre became for us something much, much more. Something…good. 

What sounds are these…?

What sounds are these I hear

of sobs and sighing, seering pain of doubt.

If leaves could talk what might they say

of a crying God, a hopeful hopelessness wrapped in trust?

* * *

Raked across an endless heart,

the bursting bastions of familial love

come couched in terms of unsteady prayers, yearning, yet wavering.

One, two, three faltering steps toward full submission to…what?

* * *

“Must it be this way? Must this broken sentence require my full stop?

Let it be but a misstep, a simple error in divine judgment, and a world

hurled into disarray is called back again.

Must you kiss away their pain with my blood on your lips?”

* * *

Daylight friends become nighttime strangers.

Eyelids, heavy with grief, fear and confusion

flutter and fail. Closed and unseeing they become

when sharp and sure is needed most.

* * *

Gruff and groping they march,

crashing through grass, garden and grove,

sniffing and snorting with dark and heavy purpose.

A poisoned kiss stops cold their treading, hateful boots.

* * *

Two cold lips meet two warm cheeks.

Foe, one time friend, greets friend of all foes

and the world holds its breath –

pausing hell’s raucous revelry and heaven’s sonorous singing.

* * *

Ponderous parade of an army and shackled lamb

whisks down backroads to audience with puppets and clowns,

whose dirty, back-room deals deal out kangaroo justice,

promising the untimely sham of caustic, casual connivances.

* * *

Spewing, spitting, spluttering out lies,

the venom of their dalliance denies all place for truth.

And a king receives a pauper’s sentence.

And a pauper refuses a king’s ransom.

* * *

The dam of reason well collapsed

and the hammer of hate posing as justice

falls as teeth, claws and fangs bite deep

tearing open his back. Men flay the skin of God.

* * *

He is dressed in the accoutrements of power

the punch-line of sparring, jousting jokes

fit for fools, bullies and frightened little boys

with big fists and a caged bird.

* * *

His walk of shame, will soon regale his fame

and repeal the petty finagling of men, insane with lust

for blood, and bone and sating their angry palettes

on the sight of sorry sacrifice.

* * *

Bones meant for healing and holding faces in tender embrace

part for fiercer spikes, a government’s answer

to the unanswerable questions posed by a hated God,

whose broken feet stay secured to the place of their forgiveness.

* * *

Now begins, indeed, a most sinister work.

An only child, spurned by a doting Father scorns

the unsearchable pain of eternal loneliness that supercedes

a lesser pain: political torture by tiny men.

* * *

The uncertain winter sky belches forth

her mystifying darkness and the once joyous birdsong

succumbs to a silence, infinitely louder,

dripping with the shame of what shouldn’t have needed to happen.

* * *

Time’s bullseye is set in its fitting of that heaving breast,

gasping for breath, groping for a sorry excuse for waning life.

But oh, what shines forth from such battered spirit:

the alchemy of grace, a gavel strikes with love.

* * *

“It is finished” – such words, by heaven hitherto unspoken,

hang in the air like molecules of exhaled proclamation:

a deed done means another can begin,

and in 3 words, the world is forever changed.

* * *

Carrion collective circles high above,

the smell of death and forbidden dinner ripe in the air.

They, whoring, hope for bits of flesh, hair and bone,

meal of mangy wing-ed mongrels bent on the efforts of others.

* * *

Not so for this diamond, bloodied, limp and alone.

A poor man’s corpse blesses a rich man’s tomb

and scented linens shroud the face of passion

that, for now at least, lie pristine and still.

* * *

Why should such a tale, so swift, so sorrowful

twist itself into our earthly fabric?

How could such shameful chaos perpetrated by pawns

undo the fickle fate of cowards and kings?

* * *

What sounds are these I hear?

They are the mournful sobs of a Mother,

the shameful cries of deserters,

the longing sighs of the dead…