Like a guest awaited that arrives resplendent
and inevitably leaves, Easter is and now was.

All during Lent I saw crosses everywhere
in telephone poles, airplanes overhead,
the twisted rebar of burnt-out buildings,
at the throat of the thin girl outside the 7-11.

"He died for your sins," I am told. I don't deny
my sins; they are before me in my path, burning
cinders through which I must find my way. Time
and reason don't avail. This is not the question.

The disciples on the Emmaus road encountered one
whose voice they knew but could not recognize.
He stopped with them, he broke the bread,
he blessed it and then disappeared.

On Monday the machinery clanks up again,
buses wheeze and lumber. What change has come?
After every death a breath that's drawn
feels like a gift received and a grief remembered.

Every breaking body, every breaking heart,
points always in all places to the real,
the weight of stones, the newness that is possible,
the vanishing of the Real, whom I have been
running toward ever since.