"I can only hope"

Yesterday I read this Mary Karr poem on Mama:Monk and it spoke to me so much, I thought I'd share it here on this Holy Saturday.

Christ’s Passion

Sure we’re trained to his suffering, sure

the nine-inch nails, and so forth.

And the cross raised up invoked

the body’s weight so each wound tore,

and from his abdomen a length of gut

dangled down, longing towards earth.

He was a god, after all.

An eternal light swarmed in his rib cage

no less strong than the weaving nebulae that haul

this dirt-speck planet through its course.

Surely his flesh mattered less somehow, less

than yours to you. He hung against steel rods

with his whole being, and though the pain

was very pure, he only cried out once.

All that was writ down. But what if his flesh

felt more than ours, knew each breath

was a gift, and thus saw

beyond each instant into all others.

So a morsel of bread conjured up

the undulating field of wheat from whence it came,

and the farmer’s back muscles

growing specific under this shirt

and the sad, resigned pace of the mule

whose opinion no one sought.

Think of all we don’t see

in an instant. Cage that in one skull.

If Christ saw in each

pair of terrified eyes he met

every creature’s gauzy soul

then he must have looked down from that bare hill

and watched the tapestry teem

till that poor carcass he borrowed

wept tears of real blood before they

unhooked it and oiled it and bound it

round with linen and hid it under a stone,

to rise again or not, I can only hope.

-Mary Karr Viper Rum, Penguin, 1994