Next morning

A beautiful poem for Easter.

It was the dullest of mornings,
the flat nothing of a dawn
after the world’s end.
A watery sun
rising to the plangent cries of kites
circling aimlessly
above a colourless landscape
where nothing breathed that mattered any more.

The rocks beneath my feet were no less dead
than the stone in my chest,
the hills of Judah no heavier
than the load on my shoulders,
the waters of Galilee no more turbulent
than the raw nausea in my throat.

I thought of the boulder
sequestering Him from all tenderness,
from my tenderness;
and wondered how to breach its intransigence.
Yet when I found it gone
and myself facing
a black chasm, infinitely deep,
vanishing into the rock,
nothing seemed more natural.