Resurrection Angels



Easter Lillies blooming at Holyrood House, Edinburgh

Resurrection Angels

by Ruth Bidgood from Time Being (Seren)

(Poet’s Note:  The diarist Kilvert was told that people used to come to the Wild Duck Pool on Easter morning ‘to see the sun dance and play in the water and the angels who were at the Resurrection playing backwards and forwards before the sun.’)

These were not troubling the waters                          

to bring healing.  They were serving

no purpose.  After the watch at the tomb,
the giving of the good news, they were at play.
To and fro went the wings, to and fro
over the water, playing before the sun.

Stolid-seeming villagers stared

enchanted, watching sun dance and play,
light-slivers splinter water’s dark.
In dazzle they half-saw
Great shining shapes swoop frolicking
to and fro, to and fro.
 
                                     This much was shared,
expected; day and place had their
appropriateness, their certainties.
The people had no words to tell
the astonishment, the individual bounty—
for each his own dance in the veins,
brush wings on the soul.


Billy Collins Sunday will return next week.  That's right, next week.  Despite the fact that today is Easter Sunday and thus, the Lenten practices can be put aside, I will continue posting poems and reflections and sometimes just poems and sometimes just reflections . . . but probably not quite every day.  My journal has been missing me, and I it, these past six weeks. 

For today, however, I offer you this Easter poem by Ruth Bidgood.  It's not the fact that it is a poem written about an Easter morning tradition that makes me think of this as the perfect poem for this Easter morning, although that doesn't hurt.  

Rather, it is because it describes a particular event that occurs in a particular place on a particular morning, yet somehow one that is not bound in time or place.  It tells of an experience shared by a community, yet one that each person must experience, internalize and interpret in her own way, "for each his own dance in the veins, brush wings on the soul." 

And isn't that how we must all approach the story of Easter . . . or Passover, or the birth of Buddha (today is his birthday BTW), or any of the stories of our faith anew each time we hear them?

How are you experiencing familiar stories anew today?