An Updike poem I’ve always loved…: “Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience…”
Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddledeyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and thenregathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
And a poem that’s appeared on the subway recently — most of you must’ve seen it — that initially did crush me with its child-like grief and sincerity:
Heaven
by Patrick Phillips
It will be the past
and we’ll live there together.Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.It will be the past.
We’ll all go back together.Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.It will be the past.
And it will last forever.“Heaven” by Patrick Phillips, from Boy. © The University of Georgia Press, 2008.
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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