FRIDAY
Blood throbbing like muffled drums
Tendons stretching like fence-wires: tune-taut
But soundless
His reproach streaks the silence like
Lightning in darkness.
Two eyes, raging from the sandstorms of a
Thousand tears, finally close.
The body hangs limp as wet drapery on a limb.
Joseph and Nicodemus
(John 19:38-39)
What a disheveled heap
This bled-out bone bag makes
Crusted with spit and sweat
Entrusted with threats to the two of us
The workman’s wiry muscles, now slack
Are pitiful as they break through the flayed skin
But the blood – it is all gone, tired of flowing
Clotted and forgotten at the dirt footer of
The flogging pole
And of course
That cross
We avert from each other
But we cannot stop our own tears
Squeezed out between our eyelids
That should shield us from what we see here:
The candlewax pallor
The shamed nakedness we wash and cover first
To give the modesty the audience denied
Our towels dipped in the pots
We lugged down the stairs
The water pinks now
In the lamplight
Part by part
Limb by limb
We dampen and rub away
All the vestiges on
The shell of a delivered-over spirit
One of the winding cloths rolls below the ledges
We reel it in and wrap his arms
From the swaddles on our grizzled forearms
We have grown wrinkles under our tears
The weight is almost beyond our old-men strength
We heft and lean
Balance and wrap
The acrid spices
The confined space
Bring more tears
More tears
We find we do not need
The water any more
EGO EIMI
He is the Mighty One
He is the Creator,
The Great One
He who can bring victory
Out of the mingled paste
Of blood and ashes of defeat
How do I know
How can I say this
I stand with my elbows touching
Those of sorrowing men and women
Frozen in a slice of Friday-time
When all the world's hopes
Were laid in a hastily-washed heap
In a borrowed tomb
With no hope
No hope
No hope
Until the first rays of Sunday
Bathed the empty tomb ledge
–copyright, Latayne C. Scott
