"Easter 2015"--NaPoWriMo #5

This one is kicking my butt. I don't have the skill to say what I want (a common complaint with me). But I give up.

Happy Easter, folks!

 

Easter Sunday, 2015

The poets of old made bold
statements of their faith,
turning belief into great art.

Even when that faith was tried,

they turned internal struggles into
something incandescent,
illuminating the passionate struggle
of so many of their fellow seekers.

On this Easter morn, I think of them.

Then think of my own faith.
Or what’s left of it. Battered,
tested, stretched, left
tattered, thread-bare. No material
there for rendering into art.

Once that faith burned bright—

As sure as Milton’s
Or Herbert’s, or Marvell’s.
An anchor, yet not a weight.

Is it age? I think not.

The age then? Perhaps.
I sometimes think this is
the last great gasp.
The battles for “Christianity”
In my homeland? Mere death throes.

Elsewhere? Plain custom remains,

Christian and pagan trappings,
equally meaningless, mingling:
a farandole danced on feast days.

Form without function is habit.

Pretty settings for wedding pictures,
Rituals to comfort during death.

The scandals do not help.

Not that scandal is anything new.
Just ask Luther.  Or Wycliffe.
Now Francis discovers his own
Augean stables.

But, no, there’s more to it

than living in a time of skeptics,
of scandal.

My sheer hubris tells me that

Donne would understand:
Intellect at war with Faith.

Or, perhaps, education.

So many truths, how does one
hold Truth?
Do I believe there is One Path?
Or even a Path?
Or a destination it is leading to?

The Easter story

Not the only resurrection told.
Egypt, Greece, Phrygia, Persia
all have their own, as does the Norseland.
What makes the carpenter’s son the True?
And who borrowed from whom?

I have no answers, just questions.

This struggle, customarily ignored,

comes to light this day of celebration,
this day of remembrance.

If I only had the words to tell

the battle in my heart.
If only I had the art.