One day a few months back, while reading some Mary Oliver poems, I was hit with the inspiration for this piece. Several of the poems I read were dark and morose. I don’t remember what made me think of dark and morose things, but suddenly I realized that every day, I stand on faces of the dead - of my history… and of my future. Our future. And thus, the piece. Lent felt like the appropriate time to publish it.
The Dead Lie
The Dead lie, upside down in the earth’s gut, bodies shredded in sharp crags and rotting in pocked holes of rocks ancient with the terrors of time.
The Living dance, twirling on the dewy fields of cushioned green, faces washed in stars aged by the tumbling of time.
The spritely souls that tread on the spinning surface can’t see, can’t feel, can’t touch the fathomless decay that turns and turns and churns the loam soundlessly, steadily, endlessly…
Do the dead hear the echo of the calloused heel crunching a pinecone?
Do the living lament the legions lying under their pulsing bodies?
All the world is a graveyard, all the soil is a blanket. Gently it covers the broken voices of the past. Snowdrops hang their flowering faces and weep, reaching roots deep to entwine hands with the dead.
Yet…
What lies with the dead is an unseen spark; ember-red earth mingled with ruby-red flame. A song gathers in the bowels of the earth, note by note – ringing, soaring, roaring in its caverns, rattling long-awaiting gemstones loose.
And then…
Then:
Their souls crowned with sapphire, eyes alight with emerald, the dead will rise, rise from the underside of the earth. Dusty fragments of bones will seep like mist from the soil, gathering under the heavens to re-form. The snowdrops will raise their heads and see a stripe of glory shooting across the sky. The stars will glow and the earth’s belly will heal:
The tremor of time will come.
And the living will look on and wonder…
But now, now under the fragrant jasmine and velvet twilight, can the living dance for the dead? Can they delight in what once was, mourn what is now, and watch for what will come?
Yes dance, dance all you that breathe and live and move.
But do not forget that resurrection surges beneath your feet.
March, 2020