KPB Stevens

the jordan is not too far away

The sisters sent this message to Jesus: “Rabbi, the one you love is sick.” 

 ~ John 11:3 ~

In the somewhere of the hills

a man is dying,

loose in sweat in a sweat-wet robe,

the waters of his body seeping,

and his sisters don’t have

enough dry cloth

to dry his face.

They ask each passerby

to seek the healer beside the river

in that place of promises delivered,

the site of baptisms and fig trees

where the sky broke open

and a voice spoke from heaven

saying “the healer is pleasing,

and in all healing

you should be pleased.”

Those who walk in life see

the world bathed in water.

He who made the blind have sight

knows what the sisters are after.

He delays beneath the fig trees,

eats dates, engaged in reverie,

and his friends are happy there,

hidden from the death

that he won’t refrain from speaking.

Walk through the somewhere of the hills

dripping with river water.

Bring the water that breaks at birth

to the grave where Lazarus lies dreaming.

Walk with water overflowing.

Walk within all dreams of opening.

on martha and mary

Imagine if Jesus had stayed in the room,

sitting, quietly, always,

in the block of sunlight

that came through the door,

and the urgency of many tasks—

cooking lentils, enticing the odor

of onion and garlic into the air,

going to the well with a large blue urn—

imagine that the urgency was nowhere—

because it was simply the day,

and although Jesus, in the sunlight,

had some things to say, he was content

to rest, his eyes half-closed,

as a breeze shook the curtains

and sent dust wandering across the floor,

until the women sat to resume the talk

that had been interrupted by their tasks,

since one day tells its tale to the next,

and in domestic quiet

all our urgency might turn to rest,

and there’s always time to find a cross.

the anointing of bethany

You return along the mourner’s path

that you walked in winter. Now spring storms

and apple blossoms mark your way.

The smell of death has been cleansed

by wind and women’s labor.

The bandages are strands of ribbon in the trees.

Return to the table where Mary sits

and Martha serves without rancor. There is Lazarus,

the one you raised, still too stunned to offer praise,

or to comment on his incorruptible odor.

The banquet is held in his atmosphere

and its reminder of the grave.

Mary brings the scent of nard,

full of forest and dirt, fur and birth,

and it hangs, haloed, about your feet,

hangs slick within her strands of hair,

wet warmth, like turned earth,

like the dirt’s decision to release flowers.

Why wasn’t the ointment sold?

What coin can pay for everything

that has been buried and is now rising,

slowly, into rapturous green?

What coin can pay for promises, for singing birds,

for this moment of arriving spring?