My Christian poems

I wake to a glorious absurdity.
'Risen from the dead' – what divine nonsense!
Death is death, and that's it;
there is no undiscovered country,
no other shore across a final sea.

Yet twenty centuries on, twenty disciples
and one dog,
climb the hill in the morning gloaming,
as drizzle falls,
and tell the nonsense story once again,
and believe
that our sense isn't God's sense.
And the world over
...

meliagaunt

Hiatus. Flowers
on the cross, the curtain torn,
the audience hushed

meliagaunt

Evocative names - Gethsemane, Golgotha, Emmaus,
echoing in the streets of Guildford, Godalming, Esher –
exotic relics from a quaint and bygone culture,
or eternal stations of the cross?

A garden watered with tears of blood –
Gethsemane, where love and sorrow meet,
giving the lie to the myth of the passionless god,
greeting betrayal with tears and a kiss.

Politics and piety conspire to hang three men
with pain unthinkable,...

meliagaunt

He'd have had his feet washed sometime,
not with rich perfume or gushing tears,
but with water, by a hard-pressed servant,
slave almost, eyes cast down, and
shoulders sagging from a lifetime's toil.

And he'd have noticed. The servant
would have mattered, have counted to him.
And he'd have stored up in his heart
how our comfort comes at others' cost,
our humanity drains as we deny the human.

That night of all nights,...

meliagaunt

God came down from his mighty throne, and said,
No longer will I sit above the clouds,
wrapped in mystery, frightening pious fools
with threats of fire and promises of bliss.
No long will I watch the world from far,
a grumbling cosmic granddad, sending plagues
and testing times to keep them on their toes.
No longer will I spy on every move,
my angel scribes recording every sin,
every infringement of my impossible laws.

...

meliagaunt