EASTER DAY

Having some doubt whether Christ be resurrected
And not supposing a church the place to find out,
I said to my wife on the morning of Easter Day,
‘I think I’ll stay home.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed,
‘Do come. Come with us all’. (Friends were staying).
      Suddenly I had in mind that anguished mariner
Alone on a still and burning sea, and those lines
Later added as a gloss. But do not expect
To read them here, there beautiful and complete:
How he yearned for the journeying moon and stars
Moving on through the blue sky, like lords
Through their native country, where always expected,
They enter unannounced their natural sphere,
A quiet joy greeting them in their place of rest.
      In those lines I see a poor man’s dream,
Avenues of whispering trees and smiling servants,
A celebration of the serious motions of our heart,
A light and happy breeze at our coming home
Up the stone steps and into the sunlit hall,
At one with the world through which we move,
Else our quick lives lost.
                                          But to what estate
Can we return, where is that firm ground
On which at last we could set foot, confident
That we have found a home we can call ours?
Agonised, that wandering soul told and retold
The story he had become, which is our too
If we will but listen. His story, and the many others
That make up the history of our consciousness,
Of what we are or what might be, to that estate
We are always welcome—if our hearts can hear.

And as I contemplated that man becalmed
Hope and motion were stilled in me,
And I saw the unmoving years ahead,
The uncelebrated end alone. Thus bereft
He allowed himself an impossible prayer:
His petition was refused, his wicked whisper
The rattling of unrepented sin, the desperate begging
Of a death-faced man; and when it came
His praying was a grace, a power not his,
Not the cold receiving of the right to live
But a gift of love. And perhaps like him
Many of us are through much of our lives
Between two worlds, still upon a sea
Where all our words sink into silence.

      But today I have been told,
      A man is coming home,
      Back from the world he was born to
      Which he with his father built,
      Back from the world he died in,
      Built for us to be in, suffering first
      The worst that man will unto man,
      And then into the dark, all hope lost
      Across that still and silent sea, moving on
      Where none of us can move alone
      He with his father’s help is coming home.
      Or so I have been told.

And in church today there will be those
Who know his life is not theirs, yet happy
To see him coming home. Believing once
That kind of journey mine, empty of heart now
Let me be glad of another man’s making
The journey I cannot make. I should be there,
Standing in the crowd, whispering and smiling,
Happy in another’s happiness. So as they go
I call out, ‘Wait, wait, I’ll come too!’