by Luci Shaw…
The Elysian Fields veer East coast-ward, and if you’re looking down from Heaven, you’d see someone on 11th street and Washington had a crazy sense of humor. In Hoboken they play baseball on the soft, swept grass. In Hades, sunners sunbathe, relieved and insolent like they’d won some game, their good deeds shining back like a UV reflector visible across the Hudson river and the River Lethe. All the while Tantalus sits nearby contemplating suicide. He fails to carry out the act, realizing with a pitiful moan that he is already dead— but he quickly forgets. He sits, benched until…
Like all of us, I have been drawn deeply into this strange Easter when so much of the outwardly familiar has been taken away, and yet the inwardly familiar, the great Easter story of Death and Resurrection, has suddenly been renewed and become more agonisingly close, more vividly relevant to our lives than ever. But, like so many, I am deeply distressed at not being able to gather in church this morning, and to receive communion in community, to meet Christ ‘risen in bread, and revelling in wine’, as I put it in a sonnet long ago. But this Easter…
Before her fingers lost
their cunning—my mother-
in-law, last of a generation
of refugees from up north—
we’d shell peas…
Some days I notice angels everywhere,
light glancing through windows, flying
through the glass as if through air.…