John Updike: Seven Stanzas at Easter
Posted: April 20, 2014 Filed under: English, John Updike | Tags: Easter poems Comments Off on John Updike: Seven Stanzas at Easter
Andrea Mantegna_Ecce Homo, painted around 1500_Ecce Homo are the Latin words “Behold this man” spoken by Pontius Pilate in John chapter 19, verse 5, when he presents a scourged Jesus to the hostile crowd just before His Crucifixion.
John Updike (1926-2009)
Seven Stanzas at Easter (1960)
.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence:
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow,
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Andrea Mantegna_Study for a Christ_1480s_Tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad caelos, sedet ad dexteram Patris omnipotentis. Inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos._On the third day He rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
Zócalo Poets 