Good Friday 23

Looking back at the end of a glorious spring day, full of birdsong and music, I realise that the only photo out of several I took is almost identical to the one I posted on Good Friday last year. This year's hour in church was different from last year in that we had a quartet of us to sing the Reproaches  by Victoria - three women and one man managing because it's a high tenor part - and that made the service, in all its silence, drama and power, even more special for me (and though I've posted a link, it's for the setting rather than the sound, as our group sounded more ethereal).

Last year I wrote of a poem I was working on; I never shared it at the time and I forgot about it last night, for it belonged to the Thursday experience. There's so much happening that I can't think beyond the moment, it seems, but I've found a part of a longer poem from my collection Washed Up that feels right for today. (I have started on another one, but it's embryonic right now.) Sufficient to say that I was thinking on the importance to my own experience of this symbolic attendance at that long-ago execution, carried out on a political whim by a provincial official balancing his careless power with his fear of his emperor. 

This extract, however, is rather different:

Is it real? The weight of wood
is real enough, but my bearing it
seems beyond bearing and cannot be.
The slow steps seem not mine,
but made by someone
I cannot bear to inhabit. The nails
oh the nails
hotly sliding through the jolt
the hammer makes
in my body in my body
in my body in my body
two strokes each
the strokes of an expert -
it is done. Up, up – lifted up and over
the heads of the crowd I see
the city in the noon light and know
this eternity will not last long
but is it real? 

 (C.M.M. 10/04/09, from Passion Considered)