Holy Week poems 2: Jesus' death on the Cross

by Sr Ann Catherine Swailes.

It’s finished.  

Leaden, the words fall, and the silence rings. 

And rigid and unyielding as the wood,

The silly loveliness of former things

Shudders and totters, crushes, squeezes, chokes.  

All patterns spin out of shape, limbs strain to flail and flap;

It’s finished. 

Those words on the Word’s lips chapped and whipped

by the weird wind, a shrieking storm

for a caress; His dying craftsmanship

Reshapes the world, with fierce and holy tenderness.

Reshapes me, too. 

Engraves the image in my shameful dust,

Hammers with nail-gashed hands at my complicity 

With darkness, gouges out my trust in rituals of despair

The whispered chanting that insists down through the endless years,

You’re finished.

The cracked crescendo of His dying cry

Diminishes again, resolves and stills

Into the hushed wonder after birth,

into the infant Church’s wordless wail.

And in communion of exhausted tears

We hail in truth our only hope

It’s finished.