EASTER BREAK
 

Tell me again how you know I’m not Christ.

Things rise and realize their essential rites.

Rub a lamb with herbs; eat its leg and die.

Thatch sprouts from every pore; my back begins

 

to bend like a SHARP CURVE arrow.  Turn right.

I can see the destination.  It’s spring!

Anoint your breast with holy myth,

sweet sprigs of what gives breath its life:

 

symbol, or earth’s own mire.  Our loins

have struggled to mean more than mud pies.

Love’s never far from bread and wine.

Bones know by rote the miracles they knit.

 

Wasn’t that the simple parable’s point?
Last supper was a literal goodbye.

True recognition needs the Judas kiss.

I feel alive each time this tumor ticks.

 

Outside, lily axils hoist globes of rain

in proffered sacrifice to stray titmice

who then flit to the business of birds,

earnest as my building haiku or hymn.

 

You want credentials; where’d thrush learn to sing?

A nest threaded with waste is a worship;

this project, inter-species co-op shrine

to believe that I, that all, claim glory.