Resurrection Day
by P.H. Wise

The steps lead down into an awful sepulcher
Full of the smell of centuries old corpse-rot
And untold ancient putrescence
Two graves were close to me as I left the steps behind me,
And I looked upon the words there inscribed:
‘Mary, asleep in Christ,’ one gravestone read,
‘John, waiting for the final day,’ another said.
On and on, with tombs as far as sight could tell
I shook my head in wonder: here was the Church.

I looked at my hands and saw them withered,
And the rest of me the same: a frail, broken thing,
Though still possessed of a strange vigor not native to myself.
We are one, these dead and I, bound together by a power
That knows the way out of the grave.
All at once, the sepulcher no longer seemed so awful
For I had seen the truth:
Though I live and walk the earth,
I need not gather rosebuds, for I have seen the eternal rose
and like the dead, I too await my resurrection.