A broken tulip

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God on donkey’s back
It isn’t patience we lack.
Survey these old stones
these tattered cheers and weary bones.
You wish to tuck us
under your hen wings, suck us
like babes. Gentle King
we only know cherubim wings
feathers of weighty gold
and flaming swords, they fold
no soft chicks into safety.
This is why we’ve been waiting
for you to turn the table on death
stitch back the passed. Your breath
……….the Spirit-like-a-fluttering-dove
……….who crooned Creation, who ended the Flood
would stir life into those we’ve lost
would turn back evil’s tide. The cross –
no, banish the thought. We don’t need
one more Messiah dead, we need to be freed
the very earth wears shackles
the very darkness crackles
with chaos swirling over and around us
we are Noah yet without a mountain to ground us
these last, long millennia past.
God on donkey’s back
……………………..we lack.
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A little late, I know. This is the poem of last Friday. I don’t know why Holy Week brings with it a poem, but it does that for me. “Holy Week” is the week of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ — the man the Word of God became when he took on a body, to join himself to us. Every year as we relive the events of Jesus approaching Jerusalem a poem comes. Probably for the same reason that my mind responds to corona virus in poetry — how do you hold well the wonderful, terrible weight of human suffering? In Holy Week it is not only human suffering but God’s suffering that we face. This year’s poem is from the perspective of the crowd welcoming Jesus with their ideas of the kind of Messiah they needed. They truly did need (and receive) these requests — only no one could have guessed the startling way God would go about defeating death for us. It is titled “Wings”, tying together the imagery of the cherubim wings shielding the holiest space above the ark of the covenant in the Temple, the imagery of the Spirit as a bird, and the imagery of Jesus saying he wished he could gather Jerusalem to himself as hen gathers her chicks.