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Buffalo '66 (1998)

The Empty Tomb, 1889, Mikhail Nesterov

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And can we see the poetic genius of St. John who brings the resurrection story back to Genesis’s cosmic beginnings in a garden? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” —Gospel of John, 20:15 Jesus is the patient gardener. He is the “tree of life.” He is the new creation. And in him we live. From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in — black ice and squid ink — till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In his corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way. —Mary Karr, “Descending Theology: The Resurrection” (via Being Blog - Rooting the Poetry of Resurrection in the Garden of Eden) [alive on all channels]