Triumphal Entry
Palm-fronds and garments flung between the hooves,
clamour of welcome for a conqueror,
inauguration of an age chain-free . . .
Despite all earlier hints
the outcome seemed to let the shouters down.
This was to be an empire of submission:
instead of protest, service
instead of insurrection, peace.
At the other end of the week, God said,
‘Let there be blood.’ And there was blood.
His palms that cured the blind and mad
got hammered to the crossbar.
The makeshift tree became stained this time
with the red knowledge of obedience.
No friends stood by their king who hung there scorned
a felon, a failure, a mere laughing-stock
who pleaded to the dark unanswering sky.
We’re meant to clasp that starless paradox.
That apparent loss of God contains our hope
all that we dread unshirked and undergone
by one who dared the worst the world can do.
An empty tomb at daybreak shone with proof.
One wounded hand unlocked the gate of death
to show the proper end of frailty and pain
is that quiet passing into paradise
no dust, no yelling, no mistaken dream;
admission to a place where we belong.
–Harry Guest, 1998
March 15, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Old-fashioned snob that I am, I’m rather fond of rhyme and meter and form, and I’m ambivalent about lots of contemporary poetry, including this poem. I might rather have posted Henry Vaughan’s or Christina Rosetti’s Palm Sunday poems, and maybe I will. But I like the ideas this poem is getting at, despite a few clunky lines. “The red knowledge of obedience” and “starless paradox” almost make up for “the worst the world can do”, etc.
If you have favorite Easter or Holy Week poems, please post or link to them here.
March 16, 2008 at 12:07 am
I canNOT believe it’s this time of year again already! This is such a service, Kristine, to share material to prepare us for Easter. Thank you.
March 16, 2008 at 12:18 am
Literary critique aside, I wept like a baby in The Kingdom and the Crown when Jesus was making his way on the back of the donkey towards the city.
Thanks for the poem K.
March 16, 2008 at 8:49 am
Thank you.
March 16, 2008 at 1:39 pm
This is beautiful. Thanks.
March 16, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Hosannah, loud hosannah.
March 16, 2008 at 7:57 pm
An Easter poem we like very much is Supernatural Love by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. I first saw it in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1982. This is the text; it looks like something is forcing a separation between the 2nd and 3rd lines of each triplet, so you can also find the properly formatted text here.
(Can anyone help get this post properly formatted?)
Supernatural Love
My father at the dictionary stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand
His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word ‘Carnation’. Then he bends
So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard
A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
“The obligation due to every thing
That’ s smaller than the universe.” I bring
My sewing needle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle’s eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly
Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room
Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom
Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb
To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor
Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text
I cannot read. My father puzzles why
It is my habit to identify
Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I
Can give no explanation but “Because.”
Word-roots blossom in speechless messages
The way the thread behind my sampler does
Where following each X, I awkward move
My needle through the word whose root is love.
He reads, “A pink variety of Clove,
Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.”
As if the bud’s essential oils brush
Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh
Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it’s me,
He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud:
“The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.”
Then twice, as if he hasn’t understood,
He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.”
He gazes, motionless,”Meaning a nail.”
The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,
I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth “Beloved”, but my needle caught
Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,
The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,
I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, “Daddy Daddy” -
My father’s hand touches the injury
As lightly as he touched the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.
- Gjertrud Schnackenberg