babybloomr

 One of my favorite poets/writers/friends in the world, Ragan Courtney, wrote this Good Friday poem and I wanted to share it with you all.

Happy Easter, ‘Bloomr Nation– love you guys.

 To His Mother

How can we know the pain in her heart

As she stood as rigid and still as Lot’s wife?

Tears like liquid salt flowed down her passive face.

Why had this happened to her?

Had she looked back

Wondering?

She groaned under the weight of that hideous reality,

A pillar of God creaking

Under pressure we cannot fathom.

Collapsing into the shelter of a surrogate son’s arms,

She absorbed new strength

Making it possible for her to endure the next moments.

 

As a boy, her son had been punctured by cruel splinters.

In a carpenter’s shop,

And she affectionately held him in her lap

As she tenderly tried to extract them.

She cooed to her sobbing, small son that:

He was a good boy.

She loved him.

She was proud of him for being so brave

To let her dig those mean old splinters from his hand.

Her cooing was like a dove calming him,

Reminding him who he was.

 

At Golgotha she could not comfort him.

She could not remove the hideous, iron splinters from his hands.

She stood there mute,

Eyes drinking in the shape of him,

Counting the pulse that seemed to rack his body

With every contraction of his broken heart,

Sending messages to him that:

He was a good boy.

She loved him.

She was proud of him for being so brave.

 

Finally…

Finally, he murmured

“It is finished.”

Bowed his bleeding head

And gave up his spirit.

And from that moment until the tomb was sealed,

Everything became slow, measured

As though she were performing mysterious rites as high priestess

In a new ritual of cosmic proportions.

 

She did not flinch as they

Disengaged him from the cross.

Stoically, she watched them lower him to the rocky, bloody earth.

Taking his limp figure, she pillowed him on her

Breast

Longing to comfort.

Looking at his wounds

She tried to make sense of it all.

Looking at the arc of his neck

With his head dropped back

His throat was exposed, vulnerable like sacrificial lamb.

She studied his neck,

White as alabaster,

Trying to will a pulse;

But there was none.

 

She rocked him,

Cooing,

He was a good boy.

She loved him.

She was proud of him being so brave.

And his spilled blood on her

Glistened in the fading light like rubies.