BY LAWRENCE HALL

Ice Wednesday 2021

Many crosses of ice but no ashes

Trees sagging from the icicles dragging

Little birds desperate for last summer’s seeds1

The ice ground whitening, whitening, disappearing

The power flickers and flickers and fails

And the day is one of lanterns and firewood

Everyone wrapped up in blankets and thoughts

Reading books in glaring blue battery-light

The roads are closed, and we are exiled home

Our Lenten ashes are in having no ashes

Thoughts During that Famous Light Collation on Good Friday

This morning I mowed the lawn, the springtime lawn

Then messed about with flowerpots and bees

In this little safe space of happy green

A shadow of Heaven beneath wise Plato’s oak

This evening I will visit Jerusalem

And follow timidly the Stations of the Cross

Not wanting to be noticed by Romans or Greeks

(Setting aside the fact that I am a Roman)

Time stops—with faltering steps and a contrite heart

A journey into the dark, and then—waiting

Will There be Coffee after the Crucifixion? 

Everything’s going to be discovered

And understood in the course of time,

Only we have to go on thinking

– Yevtushenko, “Zima Junction”

Not all are crucified, but all are wounded

We bring our gifts to the Altar; they fall apart

In secretly clinging to them for ourselves

Our claims to be defined by an era

But rotting corpses in a tangled wood

The celebrant elevates the Host

We lift unfocused eyes in grave pretense

Inattentive at the Wedding of worlds

The Mass is the central Act in Creation—

Not all are crucified, but all are wounded

Author’s Note

  1. “… last summer’s seeds”—I grow sunflowers and in the autumn save the seeds in that famous cool, dry place in paper or cloth, and in addition to commercial chicken scratch feed them to the birds and squirrels throughout the winter. ↩︎