This poem was originally composed as a post-Easter/Eastertide piece. It has enough resurrection pictures in it however to make it fit for our purposes here. Hence, I give you my Easter Sunday poetic offering, “Be-in-tween.”

It seems an eternity for what promised eternity

to wrest itself from dark and dank and deathly cell.

Yet hours have passed, not days and still can’t be

how you would show us life before death you fell.

* * *

Everything we gave and more to stand as one

in your reverie of newness, in time of all that comes

to quell and quiver and quash the forces of un-done

that hate and hold and hammer our daughters, our sons.

* * *

Our group was tall, like trees or hills, a truth to share

to all who hear or have not strength nor shame to hold

the weight of wait for that or this, the just or fair

awakened now but still shadow, pledge, a story told.

* * *

Why leave us in such mean estate of doubt, despair and dark

when but a word, a touch, a look all pain suspends,

and move, retool, redact the tepid toil our sorry ways embark

instead to choose what not you chose but placed in others hands depends?

* * *

But now what cryptic hint of empty rock-èd tomb bestirs

this rumored gossip that comes to taunt and tease, we rue

with quivered tongue and knees that buckle unsure

if this should be a joke, another tale to ruse, all hope undo?

* * *

Silly girls, you babble, burst and blubber forth what cannot be

the news of, what, we cannot say, except impossible to hear

and still remain in dark and desperate impossibility?

No longer face we fear of ending but ending of our fear?

* * *

If this be what I think I see then torn am I from all my knowing,

abandon now my shrinking soul and bursting out with heated heart

I clutch and grasp my tightened breast, my parch-ed throat, now stowing

what vestiges remain of sadness and remorse depart.

* * *

My brothers here and sisters, too, once shattered dreams reborn

as mist of doubt and pain of loss and waves of night congealed.

To satisfy, not mystify, was your intent. You shed the scorn

of those of them and us who turned to shame, our love concealed.

* * *

Severed from the death before, now living, path and joy to bring

you settle down to chat and dine and titillate with presence rare.

All that was then is not what now seems true or right to sing,

Still, in our time be-darked, be – in – tween, you trade your joy for our despair.

Painting by Carl Heinrich Bloch

the skies, now silent and spent

review their own sorry past

for all hope has fled

replaced by the wordless song

of a dead friend

Painting by Wayne Haag.

Hints in a meal of trouble, come

while bread, still warm, newly broken

abides, hidden securely between teeth

in mouths hungry for more.

Hunger assuaged, 24 clean feet and a single, haunted table.

Only crumbs remain,

mixed up and jumbled in pools of spilled wine.

A rumpled table top, tussled

with detritus of a meal, but laughing, flaunting its revelry

through unknowing smiles and the heavy eyelids of sleepy friends.

They restfully recline, sashes loosened,

bits of meat trapped in beards,

but not without gnawing whispers of

“what now?” “What next?” “When?” And in their shared memory

of goodness sense not the coming bad; the storm clouds of betrayal.

An ominous, stealthy breeze sneaks through the room,

slithering past befuddled hearts

and blows its dark breath from one

whose riskless love cannot match he whose riskily painted love,

soon full-flayed and dying, cannot be matched.