I have a hard time with Holy Saturday. A Good Friday service promises to weigh me down with my sin, the wetness of Jesus’ blood, and the distress in his voice as he cries into the darkness, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And I can wake up Easter Sunday knowing that the planters filled with lilies, church goers shouting “He is risen indeed,” and a steaming plate of ham will draw me into a celebration of resurrection. But Saturday slips quietly in between and I’m tempted to wake up to the world as I know it, the world as normal.

But the silence of Saturday ripples with paradox and grief. If we take the time to venture in, we can see the chaos our sin creates and feel, if just for a moment, a heaviness that makes us long for Resurrection Sunday—both Jesus’ and our own. 

Step with me into Dead Saturday, a poem I wrote a couple years ago. (Note: If you’re on a mobile device, a horizontal view may provide a better layout). 

Dead Saturday

Soldiers sweat and curse

and veins pop out in strain

against the boulder,

which groans,

then weeps into its place,

strangling the final shaft of light,

choking out the song of birds, profanity—

of life.

The universal

notes wrenched off their page

and pulverized into a heap of dust—

his melody, which pushed

the sap up trees and orbited stars,

now urned inside

ceramic vocal chords

and lying cold as ash.

A body swallowed

by the dark (the light which birthed

the sun snuffed out)

and blood seeps through his thighs

and back and calves, like lava, hardening

to black and blue.

The muscles petrify

between his metacarpal bones

and hands—which spun out gravity

and twirled black holes like tops—

lay welded to the slab below,

two fossils.

A body bag of stone

cemented shut,

he’d be asphyxiated,

but he’s already been suffocated

on the cross and smothered now

under pounds of cloth

’til rigor mortis seizes hope, ablates it.

His heart—pacemaker

of the universe—now sags,

two-thirds a pound of meat

against his spine,

and lungs, once forging oxygen,

stagnate

into a toxic pond.

Body severed from breath—

it’s finished.

And, everything is death.