History Books and Gospels

A poem about living in stories that aren't written yet

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

It turned into an Easter poem, because, well, I’m me. I had more than Easter on my mind when I wrote it.

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I keep thinking
about history books and gospels
laying out their stories – 
That happened, and then This;
and we say Of course, we are not surprised,
we have been told this story before,
we may not know every part of the story
but we know This happened next.

I keep thinking
about the people in the stories
who did not know, when That happened,
that This would follow – 
who may have hoped for This
or feared it or expected it or not,
who had no way to know.

I keep thinking
about his friends in the gospel story
who had no gospel story to read
on the day he died or on the day after,
who lived for three days
in the That of his dying
as if there were no This,
as if the story were over even though
the days kept trudging by,
full of nothing but That.

I keep thinking
of how they had no way to know
that This would happen next,
especially This – 
that they would find him next to them alive
in their room or by the lake,
saying Peace, saying Look,
saying Yes I died and dying
tore holes in me that you could drown in but
don’t, because there is more to the story,
saying How’s the fishing?
saying What have you got to eat?

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

I wrote this poem in spring 2021. Certainly I was thinking about Easter, and about the wisdom that one of my favorite preachers offered years ago — how different Easter is for us than it was for Jesus’s disciples, for a hundred reasons but mostly because, while we walk through Holy Week in full anticipation of the joys of Sunday, his disciples didn’t know what came next in the story … how, if they even remembered Jesus predicting his own resurrection, those memories must have been impossible to take seriously in light of what had happened over the past few days. Until the next day came, and the next thing happened.

So I was thinking about that sermon when I wrote this poem, and also thinking that for maybe the first time I was really feeling some tiny fraction of what the disciples must have felt … because it was the spring of 2021, and I was profoundly aware that in the last year or so things had happened in my country and in the world that would absolutely be written about in history books from now on … and people would read the story and nod, and have no freakin’ idea what it was like to live through 2020 and the beginning of 2021 and really not know what turn this particular story was going to take.

I have no gift for writing poems about current events and politics, so this one took a hard turn into Easter. Which is okay. There’s room inside the Easter narrative for a lot of other stories to take a new grip, when they need to, on life and mystery and hope. That’s a good thing to know as I try to discern and carry out my tiny part in history, today in 2024.