I’m all mud from falling slope. It’s soil like he was black, in shirt and pants and voice and paper in a church so still even the babies hushed.
I remember Friday as we walk on Saturday. The grass and sky all there is, hills of scratchy green and boy in wagon and us on this Easter weekend climbing Calvary. My fingernails caked from where I scratched the earth.
It’s as quiet here as it was when Trent played Jesus in the Good Friday reader’s theatre, and they all wore black and one of them dropped rocks clang clang into a wheelbarrow as Christ was crucified, nails dug into blood into sinew, and everything tore, like a woman giving birth, the earth splitting red and God groaning and redemption being born when it was finished.
We climb and eternity stretches hands across the blue. This, a morning walk by the river and we’re pilgrims of jean and running shoe.
Trent stood in church and said the words, the words of a misunderstood Savior, and we’d fought early that day and I’d thrown stones so hard I wanted his flesh to tear, and he’d just stood and let me throw. When it was finished I’d cried. Why do I always try to sabotage love?
Everything in this place, the mud, the sky, the grass, tell me how small I am. How insignificant, me, and how big the gift. Swallowed up by the space of air and spring I can finally breathe. Today here, tomorrow but a prayer.
I feel it all enter, this creation, caked with earth and stones thrown hard, and on the hill, there is no more cross. Just heaven. For he is risen.
(sharing with One Stop Poetry)
*photos by Allison Dow