Resurrection

Resurrection

By Alison Hawthorne Deming

My friend a writer and scientist

has retreated to a monastery

where he has submitted himself

out of exhaustion to not knowing.

He’s been thinking about

the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang

after hearing a monk’s teaching

that crucifixion was not the hard part

for Christ. Incarnation was.

How to squeeze all of that

all-of-that into a body. I woke

that Easter to think of the Yaqui

celebrations taking place in our city

the culminating ritual of the Gloria

when the disruptive spirits

with their clacking daggers and swords

are repelled from the sanctuary

by women and children

throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti

and then my mother rose

in me rose from the anguish

of her hospice bed a woman

who expected to direct all the action

complaining to her nurse

I’ve been here three days 

and I’m not dead yet—not ready

at one hundred and two to give up

control even to giving up control.

I helped with the morphine clicker.

Peace peace peace the stilling

at her throat the hazel eye

become a glassy marble. Yet here she is

an Easter irreverent still rising

to dress in loud pastels

and turn me loose

in Connecticut woods to hunt

my basket of marshmallow eggs

jelly beans and chocolate rabbit

there fakeries of nature made vestal

incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.