Good Friday afternoon
and silence falls

Small movements of the blossomed trees,
a bird or two, wagtail or robin,
casually busy round about.

Silence means not absence of all usual sounds
but a concurring stillness
which nature seems to share:

The mountains wrapped in mist
sunlight enhancing all the eye absorbs:

Colours of the years first flowers
bare branches shadows scribbled on the grass
the unleaved trees awaiting summer growth.

Our world is at a standstill
in this centre point of time and space
where we await a Dying and an End.

Once more this Dying, and again this End
familiar, and each year renewed
in anguished expectation.

Familiar Ending and each year renewed,
a springing back to life, a greenness, the opening of new leaf,
new life, a Resurrection,
making it seems a final End,
yet offering once again
a new Beginning forged of all our pasts
and all our solitary dyings.

April O'Leary rscj Llannerchwen 1998

EASTER GOLD

That Easter dawn He looked with new delight
upon the worlds known loveliness:
oxalis, buttercup and marigolds
ran riot round those blessed feet that bent
yet bruised them not. He saw slant through the trees
the days first sunlight, and the insect wings
that beat into its beams flashed burnished gold.

Far off on more widespread horizons than of Galilee
his visionary gaze saw harvest fields now ready for the scythe,
saw lifted, repetition making one golden stream
through the unmeasured future, countless chalices and patens
less precious far than what they, offering, held,
and knew a lift of heart and expectation.
It was indeed a golden dawn that met His wondering eyes
As He stepped from the tomb on that new day.

April O'Leary rscj Malta 1963

 

April died in February 2013 aged 90. RIP