Saturday

Saturday

He was here and then he wasn't,

And we, suspended in a choking fog

Of grief and disbelief, suffered no suspense

Because we didn't know we were waiting.

All we knew was the silence of loss

After yesterday's utter violence.

It hung in the air of our hiding place

Like the last word spoken in a fight

Hangs in an empty room.

The palpable presence of the shape of pain

Was fast and final, irreversible and irreconcilable.

It is finished meant it was over.

We sat there mute in our disbelief,

Engulfed as our unbelief hardened.

He was here and then he wasn't.

The fullness of everything became inexplicably

The emptiness of nothing but our fear

And the back side of our faith.

All night and all day and all night again,

We sat in the shadow of death,

Numb on the knife edge of hysteria,

Gutted yet stuffed with the fist of the punch in the gut.

We sat in our appalling unfaithfulness, our embarrassing faithlessness,

Feeling justified in forgetting everything he'd ever told us–

Because, in fact, he had told us,

But somehow we of little faith didn't know

We were supposed to wait with him one hour.

We were supposed to wait for him three days.

He was here and then he wasn't,

So we slept in that tomb of a room

In an endless wide-eyed waking sleep with no suspense

Because we didn't know we were waiting.

But then, in the morning, just as he'd said,

He tore back through the veil into time.

The shroud of our misunderstanding

Dissolved like mist with the dawning.

Into our deaf and sightless stupor

Came thunder and lightning and crystal clarity.

Our faithlessness, that stubborn bulwark,

Splintered in the storm surge of his faithfulness.

It is finished meant I have done it!

We were stunned at the shape of him,

So recently with us and then so absolutely gone.

For he was gone and then he wasn't.

And that time we sat suspended

Was instantly redefined

As only that one day of hushed suspense

When we waited for the dawn of forever.

erinrms 4/11/2020