not the end of the story.
Trees do not fight
the slow turning of the earth,
that every twelve months demands a sacrifice
of what had clothed them all year long.
Surrendering
to the will of gravity
and the whims of the friend
who once kissed their branches
with warmth and light,
they embrace the sadness of his distance,
the days becoming colder and briefer
until they barely feel his presence
at all.
They allow a part of themselves
to die
and fall to the ground,
a sad echo of the triumphant glory of color and life
that once caused heads to turn
and hearts to quicken.
Somehow they know
that the breaking off
of a part of themselves
leaves room for fresh new life
to appear,
when the time is right.
Somehow they are free
from anxiety,
never clinging to their right
to keep what is at once so beautiful and fragile,
but letting it go willingly.
Death must come first,
then resurrection;
falling comes before rising.
The trees have always known it.
I wish that I
could be as confident.
It’s springtime. Yet all around us, things are dying. This season has been marked by profound loss, and it’s not merely a localized or personal set of losses. We are in a season of global grief.
But there have also been the personal losses. I wrote this poem a month before the coronavirus became a pandemic, trying to process the sadness in my own heart over the season that I’m in personally. Perhaps you are also feeling the weight of sadness and death in your work, family, relationships, or any number of other things, and the turmoil of what is happening in the world only adds to that weight.
Today is Good Friday. We call it “good” not because Christ’s death looked good or felt good. No, we call it “good” because we know that death was not the end of the story. We know that resurrection surely followed. Christ did not stay dead.
Yet at the time of His death, everything seemed hopeless. New life had not yet come out of the tragedy. It seems that we are in that kind of season today. We do not know if or how or when life will be restored and renewed on our disease-ravaged planet. Yet though hope seems distant, I want to believe that this is not the end of the story.
I want to believe that resurrection is coming. Because our God is a God who brings life out of death. And that is our hope.