Is it okay to throw the dishes if you aren’t aiming at anyone?
If love is not reciprocal, it’s naivety.
I trusted you. You embarrassed me.
Why tempt us to devotion then stay distant yourself?
I watched dismay dawn on the face of your child,
Tender heart broken, your biggest fan,
Realizing nobody’s coming after all—
After all the food was made and the party gifts prepared—
And I said you could be trusted. The lamb is dead.
It’s impossible to praise this
Or the choice you’ve made.
You have power over death,
But your hand was stayed.
“Just think about the warm house—hot drinks—the fireplace up ahead.”
But how far ahead?
How long am I to limp in the cold?
Don’t let anybody tell you it’s a nice highway—
And God driving by in the storm.
“I have gone to prepare a place for you—
I just can’t fit you now in my car!”
You who put spring after winter for a sign—
I’m shivering.
What fury, what shock, to wear the pelt of my friend.
And I’m supposed to accept this?
If death didn’t merit stomping my feet,
You would have done nothing about it.
I am in the image of God
So I protest: love is stronger than death.
If it’s a competition, you lost all your children—
Long before I got here, the ashes were falling.
Please don’t shut me out in your grief, Lord—
Who will comfort you?
If you stepped into my garden, my kitchen, the tomb
Saying, “I have heard your prayers and come responding to them—”
If you told me, in five minutes, the flesh would become warm—
The breath of life return—
I think that I’d stop crying.
Or I’d cry in another direction.
But you—
You stand here in our midst, knowing just what you’ll do,
As one of our faces, and cry.
There is no teachable moment.
You weep because you have to—
It’s that bad—for you, too.
You know you’ve come to end this.
You cry two thousand years.
(2021)
Hannah Hunt 