a poem for good friday {2009}

Good Friday


I remember.
Thick spikes,
wooden crossbeams.
A circle of thorns.
Agony. Blood.

I have nothing to add
that you have not heard;
my voice harmonizes
with the chorus of remembrance:

my sin
your love
my hate
your love
my pride
your love
my rejection
your love

And I forget.
My skin is too thick
and I over fond of my calluses,
numb and hard and yellow.

I pray:
like the heavy curtain,
rend my heart in two
let your blood flood the crevices,
and proclaim:
“It is finished.”

Enter
my holy of holies.

loving god is like ...

Tidal

I grew up on the ocean,
so the ocean did not hold the same romance
for me as it did for, say

a farmer's daughter in Iowa who grew up
playing hide and seek in rows of corn,
or someone who had always lived in

and never left the big city
skyscraperssmogandtrafficjams.
At age nine, I knew the ocean

as what tossed me
in a little boat in forty knot winds
like a beach ball; I sweated

and my tiny white body trembled
as I clutched the handles of a soup pot
for just in case I should vomit.

I know that a wind coming off the ocean
can blow right through you,
move clean through the pores of your skin

on one side, go through your body
and exit through the pores on the other side,
that there is not always

sandy beaches good for hand-holding, that sometimes
there is just the black ogre rocks
barnacles and limpets cling to,

good for scraping knees and elbow on.
I know the ocean smell and feel--
the sticky-salty damp and cleanness,

the sand underneath your feet evaporating
as waves crowd in ripples around your ankles
and pull it away. The breaths you breathe are deeper

when you're there. This same ocean
has turned us over in boats and swallowed us
ever since there have been boats and people to swallow.

I remember first hearing about
my Scandinavian heritage and taking pride
in the fact that my ancestry

was made up of explorers:
people of wanderlust and restlessness
who would spend months at a time

out of the sight of land,
no longer in love with what was tame.
The people I came from lived

on the ocean, and I still like to think about
how their bodies produced children
and their children had children

who made more children, and so on
until me, who would not have been made
unless men and women who lived

on the ocean (and in between times
on land) had continued in the making
that also made them. I like to think

that had they not slept on the swells and tides,
their bodies not learned to roll with a sometimes savage motion--
had they not allowed the wind to cut through them

I would not be me: I could not say this
and I would be docile as a nun, content
with what had already been leashed and tamed.

I would not lust for the ocean
which I know can swallow me whole.

kirsten, 1999