Poems For The Paschal Triduum

by Ann Hine rscj

Good Friday

“Just hold me”, you said
How to hold someone so wounded
so that they will not suffer more?

I wind you round
with a thistledown of love
as a buffer to your bruised
and broken body.
So I hold you.

Amazed that you should need me
in your affliction.
And yet knowing within myself
That pain of body
is less than the desolation
of spirit in its aloneness.
That the power of love
meets a wordless chasm of self’s death
in the isolation betrayal brings.

Oh my dearest, dear,
I hear the echoes here
I know the pain and
hold you in the heart place
as you held me to bring new life.
I am with you
compassion speaks my silence.

Holy Saturday in H-Wing Durham

Such an oppression of pain here.
A world of women’s woundedness.
We stand in this tomb
clanging emptiness
shouts and shrieks.
And yet there is a welcome
in sharing these women’s grief
in facing the loss of all that is loved
searching through the dregs of life
for self and for a meaning,
as death snatches the very ground of being,
and all certainty is taken from us.
So together we sought you;

and as the women two thousand years ago
We waited to anoint you.

We held each others pain and found in
our woundedness a resting place for you.

"Dawn" by Regina Shin rscj

Easter Sunday 1994

The heaviness that so much grief brings
is still with me.
And I look to find you risen.

But shall I know You!

You who were mistaken for a stranger,
a gardener, a companion on the road.

Shall I know You when I meet You?

It was a small word whispered in my ear
as I went to greet another
“thank you”
that left my heart burning.