I have a hard time with Holy Saturday. A Good Friday service promises to weigh me down with my sin, the wetness of Jesus’ blood, and the distress in his voice as he cries into the darkness, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And I can wake up Easter Sunday knowing that the planters filled with lilies, church goers shouting “He is risen indeed,” and a steaming plate of ham will draw me into a celebration of resurrection. But Saturday slips quietly in between and I’m tempted to wake up to the world as I know it, the world as normal.
But the silence of Saturday ripples with paradox and grief. If we take the time to venture in, we can see the chaos our sin creates and feel, if just for a moment, a heaviness that makes us long for Resurrection Sunday—both Jesus’ and our own.
Step with me into Dead Saturday, a poem I wrote a couple years ago. (Note: If you’re on a mobile device, a horizontal view may provide a better layout).
Dead Saturday
Soldiers sweat and curse
and veins pop out in strain
against the boulder,
which groans,
then weeps into its place,
strangling the final shaft of light,
choking out the song of birds, profanity—
of life.
The universal
notes wrenched off their page
and pulverized into a heap of dust—
his melody, which pushed
the sap up trees and orbited stars,
now urned inside
ceramic vocal chords
and lying cold as ash.
A body swallowed
by the dark (the light which birthed
the sun snuffed out)
and blood seeps through his thighs
and back and calves, like lava, hardening
to black and blue.
The muscles petrify
between his metacarpal bones
and hands—which spun out gravity
and twirled black holes like tops—
lay welded to the slab below,
two fossils.
A body bag of stone
cemented shut,
he’d be asphyxiated,
but he’s already been suffocated
on the cross and smothered now
under pounds of cloth
’til rigor mortis seizes hope, ablates it.
His heart—pacemaker
of the universe—now sags,
two-thirds a pound of meat
against his spine,
and lungs, once forging oxygen,
stagnate
into a toxic pond.
Body severed from breath—
it’s finished.
And, everything is death.
